Jigisha murder: HC commutes death penalty of 2 to life term

NEW DELHI: The Delhi HC on Thursday commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence of two convicts in the 2009 murder of IT executive Jigisha Ghosh, saying the circumstances of the killing could not be deemed as “rarest of the rare”.

A bench of Justice S Muralidhar and Justice IS Mehta modified the death sentence awarded to Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla by a city court in 2016 while upholding the life imprisonment of the third convict, Baljeet Malik.

The trial court, while pronouncing its sentence, had said that Jigisha was killed in a “coldblooded, inhuman and cruel manner” and “brutally mauled to death”. The three convicts were allegedly also involved in the 2008 murder case of TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan, who was found shot dead in her car in south Delhi.

They have also been linked to the January 2009 murder of a taxi driver, Mohd Nadeem.

The trials are on in both cases. “Having carefully considered the entire case from all perspectives, the court is not satisfied that the crime here can be characterised as ‘rarest of rare’ that warrants the award of the death penalty for Kapoor and Shukla,” the high court bench said in its 41-page judgment.

The judges observed that it was not clear as to which of the three accused had actually killed Jigisha’s murder even though it was proved beyond doubt all three were involved in the crime.