Jigisha murder: HC commutes death penalty of 2

new delhi — The Delhi High Court on Thursday commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence of two convicts accused of murdering in 2009 IT executive Jigisha Ghosh.

Justice S. Murlidhar and Justice I.S. Mehta modified the death sentence awarded to Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla by the trial court and said they would serve life imprisonment. “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 said.

“The Court accordingly modifies the sentence awarded to Kapoor and Shukla for the offence under sections 302/34 IPC (murder with common intention) to one of imprisonment for life,” the judges said.

The two death row convicts had challenged the trial court’s conviction and sentence. The trial court had sentenced a third offender, Baljeet Malik, to life imprisonment for his good conduct in jail.

On July 14, 2016, the trial court held them guilty of the murder.

The High Court said it was not clear which of the three accused — whether all of them or only some of them — committed the murder of Jigisha.

“What is proved beyond doubt is that all of them were involved in the crime. Therefore, to differentiate, as the trial court has done, between the accused by awarding the death penalty to two of them may also not be justified,” said the court. The bench said that in any event the behaviour of a prisoner during his term as an under trial cannot be a sufficient marker for his potential for reform and rehabilitation. The 28-year-old Operations Manager at Hewitt Associates in Noida was abducted after an office car dropped her around 4am near her Delhi home.

The trial court had said she was killed in a “cold-blooded, inhuman and cruel manner” and “brutally mauled to death”.

It had said that the “magnitude and brutality” exhibited by the three made the case “rarest of rare”, warranting capital punishment for Kapoor and Shukla. —