SC convicts man in 45-year-old murder case
Dhananjay.Mahapatra@timesgroup.com 10.04.2018
New Delhi: A farmer was brutally murdered in a village in Sasaram, Bihar, in October 1973, his body was cut into two by rich and influential assailants and 45 years later, the judicial process culminated in the Supreme Court on Monday with life sentence to one person.
A Sasaram trial court took 15 years to find five people guilty of murdering farmer Gupteshwar Singh. He was done to death by influential members of the village for not heeding to their threat that he would be killed if he deposed against them in two theft cases lodged against them by the railway police. The trial court sentenced all of them to life imprisonment in 1988.
The convicts appealed against the trial court order in the Patna high court, which took 22 years to uphold the trial court’s decision. The appeals were filed in the Supreme Court in November 2010 and notices were issued on March 18, 2011. But for some strange reason, the appeals could not be taken up for hearing for seven years.
The task was finally entrusted to a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and M Shantanagoudar, which heard counsel for the accused and the state government on March 22 this year and gave its verdict on Monday. It upheld the conviction of one Kameshwar Singh and sentenced him to life imprisonment, but gave the four others benefit of doubt and acquitted them.
Dhananjay.Mahapatra@timesgroup.com 10.04.2018
New Delhi: A farmer was brutally murdered in a village in Sasaram, Bihar, in October 1973, his body was cut into two by rich and influential assailants and 45 years later, the judicial process culminated in the Supreme Court on Monday with life sentence to one person.
A Sasaram trial court took 15 years to find five people guilty of murdering farmer Gupteshwar Singh. He was done to death by influential members of the village for not heeding to their threat that he would be killed if he deposed against them in two theft cases lodged against them by the railway police. The trial court sentenced all of them to life imprisonment in 1988.
The convicts appealed against the trial court order in the Patna high court, which took 22 years to uphold the trial court’s decision. The appeals were filed in the Supreme Court in November 2010 and notices were issued on March 18, 2011. But for some strange reason, the appeals could not be taken up for hearing for seven years.
The task was finally entrusted to a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and M Shantanagoudar, which heard counsel for the accused and the state government on March 22 this year and gave its verdict on Monday. It upheld the conviction of one Kameshwar Singh and sentenced him to life imprisonment, but gave the four others benefit of doubt and acquitted them.
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