25-yr-old woman convicted of killing father after fight
NEW DELHI: Stating that a “young irascible lady destroyed her own creator by committing patricide”, a Delhi court on Monday sentenced a 25-year-old woman to four-and-a-half years imprisonment for killing her father intentionally by pushing him down the stairs at their home in north-west Delhi’s Vijay Nagar.
Additional Sessions Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal also imposed a fine of ₹10,000 on Jaya for pushing her 68-year-old father, Satish Chawla, down the stairs in February 2015, after a scuffle between the two, leading to Chawla ’s death in the hospital two days later.
“Nothing can be more profane and impious than killing one’s own father for whatever reason,” the court said in its order.
According to the prosecution, the convict along with her father, two sisters and a brother lived on the second floor of their house in Vijay Nagar.
According to her elder sister’s testimony, Jaya had always been short-tempered and aggressive and would often beat up the siblings and their father.
On February 14, 2015, Jaya had a fight with her father following which she assaulted him and broke his spectacles.
Perturbed by the sequence of events, the father threatened to leave the house and move into an ashram.
After packing his clothes and belongings in a bag he started walking down the stairs when Jaya pushed him. Following this, Chawla fell from the staircase and was rushed to the hospital where he succumbed to the injuries on February 2016, 2015.
On the basis of the statement given by the woman’s brother Nikhil, the police had registered an FIR in the Mukherjee Nagar police station.
However, Jaya had said that she was being falsely implicated. She also questioned her elder sister, Sakshi’s testimony, who had deposed against her.
However, the court said that even though Sakshi had a property dispute with Jaya, she could not be called an “interested” witness.
The court maintained that the dispute had not diminished Sakshi ’s objectivity, veracity and observational sensitivity.
“The probative force of her testimony has remained more or less intact even after incisive cross-examination by the defence,” the judge said convicting Jaya under Section 304, Part II of the Indian Penal Code (culpable homicide not amounting to murder).
The court said that it could be safely concluded that it was the “accused (Jaya) who intentionally and deliberately gave push to her father when he was climbing down the stairs with the knowledge that by said act, she was likely to cause death of her father to whom she had pushed considering his old age and the fact that he was very weak, emaciated and of frail structure”.
The court sentenced her to four and a half years imprisonment saying that even if this “monstrous act deserves no mercy, but at the same(time), the convict has a five-month-old infant son in her arms to feed”.