Jigisha’s murder not ‘ rarest of rare’: HC It was not possible to establish who exactly killed Jigisha: Investigator
SENTENCE COMMUTED Court says behaviour of a prisoner during his term as an undertrial not sufficient marker for death sentence
NEW DELHI: In 2016, the sessions court had cited Jigisha’s killers’ “unsatisfactory” conduct in jail while handing death sentence to two of them and awarding a life term to the third person. On Thursday, the Delhi High Court overruled the lower court’s observation and spared the death row convicts from the gallows.
The high court said that a prisoner’s stint in jail as an undertrial was not enough to say if he was capable of rehabilitation or not.
The convicts, Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla, had earlier been awarded the death sentence in 2016 by a city court even as their associate, Baljeet Malik, was handed a life sentence because of his good behaviour in Tihar Jail.
One of the convicts, Ravi Kapoor, had around a dozen cases pending against him when he was picked up for Jigisha’s murder. It is also alleged that he was an informer for the police. The other two were petty criminals. All three of them lived in south Delhi neighbourhoods .
The high court pointed out that the circumstances under which an undertrial prisoner stays in jail is not ground enough to judge his potential for reform or reha- bilitation.
“An undertrial prisoner is not given the same tasks as the convicts, something that can help judge their behaviour. Further, the undertrial wards in Tihar Jail are usually overcrowded by more than 100%,” the court said.
The trial court had relied on the pre-sentence report (PSR) which referred to the conduct of Kapoor and Shukla in jail being unsatisfactory and the fact that they were involved in other criminal cases. It had observed that Kapoor and Shukla were incapable of being reformed and Malik was capable of reform .
However, the high court said that in any event the behaviour of a prisoner during his term as an undertrial cannot be a sufficient marker for his potential for reform and rehabilitation.
The bench further said that homicidal killings are deeply troubling. They are reflective of the base instincts of human behaviour.
“Some homicidal killings are in degree more diabolical, repulsive and shocking than others. Section 302 IPC (murder) offers only two choices for punishment. Life imprisonment or the death penalty. It is this limited option that has driven the Supreme Court to devise the ‘rarest of rare’ test......that life sentence is the rule and death sentence the exception,” the HC bench said.
The bench, however, did not dispute the commission of the crime and said, “the court is satisfied that when the above proved circumstances are viewed collectively they point unerringly to the guilt of the accused.”
THE CASE
Jigisha Ghosh (28) was working as operations manager in Hewitt Associates Private Limited in Noida. Her house was in Vasant Vihar. An office cab used to pick up and drop her.
On March 17, 2009, at around noon, Ghosh left her house in the office cab. She was expected to return home at 4am on March 18, 2009. However, she failed to return home
However, when the office cab came to her house the following day at about 3pm to pick her up, her father realised that she had not stayed in the office. Her phone was switched off. The office could not provide any clues as to her whereabouts. A case was registered at Vasant Vihar police station based on the statement of Jigisha’s father on March 19, 2009. Her body was found on March 21, 2009, in the bushes near Faridabad’s Suraj Kund area. “The killers may have been spared the gallows because of their young age but what about our lives? Our pain doesn’t matter? Why is there hesitation to hand out the harshest punishment when the crime has been established without any doubt?" Jigisha's mother NEW DELHI: An investigator who pursued the case against Jigisha Ghosh’s killers said that there was no way they could establish without a doubt which of the three actually strangulated the woman.
“Jigisha was strangulated to death. There was no other weapon used in the murder so it was not possible for us to gather fingerprints. So, there is no way to scientifically establish who actually killed Jigisha,” said an investigator directly associated with the probe.
While commuting the death penalty to life imprisonment for Jigisha’s killers, the Delhi High Court had pointed out that it was not clear as to which of the three convicts — whether all of them or only some of them — actually committed the murder.
“What is proved beyond doubt is that all of them were involved in the crime,” the high court said.
“Since the court upheld their involvement in the crime, it shows that we did not lack in our investigations. We proved that all the three men had a common intention of killing her (Jigisha). After that, it is a matter of interpretation and the court’s job to judge whether it was the rarest of rare crime or not,” the probe official told Hindustan Times.
The officer said that his interaction with the killers showed they were “beyond reform.”
“They had shown no remorse. They would have killed more people had they not been arrested by the police. They did not believe in letting go of their victims after robbing them. They thought leaving the victims alive would get them caught,” said the officer.
The three killers are also on trial for robbing and killing two other persons, a woman TV journalist and a cab driver, within a six month period spanning between 2008 and 2009.
Responding to the verdict, the then south Delhi deputy commissioner of police, HGS Dhaliwal, who had led the probe in the case, also said, “The lower court as well as the high court has upheld the convictions, showing we were accurate in our probe. They have only differed in seeing it as a rarest of the rare case.”