Court sets aside death penalty, orders CBI probe
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Chennai:25.07.2018
Almost six months after a 28-year-old man was sentenced to death for the abduction and murder of a fouryear-old girl in Tiruvannamalai by a trial court, the Madras high court on Tuesday set aside the order and acquitted the accused of all charges.
This apart, a division bench of Justice S Vimala and Justice S Ramathilagam also remanded the case to CBI for re-investigation.
According to the prosecution, Manikandan, who was an acquaintance of the girl’s family, had picked her up from school on June 13, 2013, and murdered her to take revenge on her father who had allegedly abused him for not returning a loan. Finding the accused guilty, Tiruvannamalai fast track mahila court sentenced him to death.
When the reference came up before the bench, it termed the judgment as ‘poor’ and said, “Only in rarest of rare cases, even after establishment of case by the legal evidence, awarding of death penalty is permissible. This is a case where there is no evidence at all. Still, death penalty was handed down in a very casual manner, probably out of an over-enthusiasm and zeal to stray into the irrelevant considerations other than those sanctioned by the highest court of the land.”
Capital punishment will evoke awe and send shock waves only when it is based on truth and evidence and the same would lose its sanctity and severity when it is perverse and peddled frequently by every trial court for fear of indictment from outside sources, said Justice Vimala.
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Chennai:25.07.2018
Almost six months after a 28-year-old man was sentenced to death for the abduction and murder of a fouryear-old girl in Tiruvannamalai by a trial court, the Madras high court on Tuesday set aside the order and acquitted the accused of all charges.
This apart, a division bench of Justice S Vimala and Justice S Ramathilagam also remanded the case to CBI for re-investigation.
According to the prosecution, Manikandan, who was an acquaintance of the girl’s family, had picked her up from school on June 13, 2013, and murdered her to take revenge on her father who had allegedly abused him for not returning a loan. Finding the accused guilty, Tiruvannamalai fast track mahila court sentenced him to death.
When the reference came up before the bench, it termed the judgment as ‘poor’ and said, “Only in rarest of rare cases, even after establishment of case by the legal evidence, awarding of death penalty is permissible. This is a case where there is no evidence at all. Still, death penalty was handed down in a very casual manner, probably out of an over-enthusiasm and zeal to stray into the irrelevant considerations other than those sanctioned by the highest court of the land.”
Capital punishment will evoke awe and send shock waves only when it is based on truth and evidence and the same would lose its sanctity and severity when it is perverse and peddled frequently by every trial court for fear of indictment from outside sources, said Justice Vimala.
No comments:
Post a Comment