Supreme Court commutes death penalty of a man guilty of murdering pregnant daughter

The bench said that the crime committed by the appellant is unquestionably grave and unpardonable but it is not appropriate to affirm the death sentence that was awarded to him.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of a man who murdered his pregnant daughter in 2013, for performing an inter-caste marriage.

A bench of Justices B R Gavai, Aravind Kumar and K V Vishwanathan, however, commuted the capital punishment awarded to Eknath Kisan Kumbharkar, saying that the crime committed by the appellant is unquestionably grave and unpardonable but it is not appropriate to affirm the death sentence that was awarded to him.

The court also noted the appellant Kumbharkar was aged about 38 years at the time of commission of the crime and he has no criminal antecedents, and the medical reports of the appellant would disclose that he has speech issues, and has undergone an angioplasty in 2014, apart from suffering other serious ailments.

The bench said the conduct report from the prison would disclose that the behaviour of the appellant in the jail is satisfactory with everyone for the past six years.

The court also pointed out the doctrine of ‘rarest of rare’ requires that the death sentence should not be imposed only by taking into consideration the grave nature of crime but only if there is no possibility of reformation by a criminal.

However, being conscious of the fact that sentence of life imprisonment is subject to remission, which would not be appropriate in view of the gruesome crime committed by the appellant, the court opined the course of middle path requires to be adopted in the instant case.

The court declared that appellant-accused would not be entitled to make any representation for remission till he completes 20 years of actual rigorous imprisonment.

The bench also noted that in the instant case, the appellant hailed from a poor nomadic community in Maharashtra. He had an alcoholic father and suffered parental neglect and poverty.

He dropped out of school when he was 10 years old and was forced to start working to support his family, doing odd jobs, and all efforts put by the appellant to bring his family out of poverty did not yield desired results.

In the present case, the appellant was unhappy with his daughter's decision to marry a man lower than his caste and felt it had tarnished his image in the society.

According to his wife, a prosecution witness, he used to feel that the community people of his caste had not accepted him, and he was being defamed in the society because of his daughter's inter-caste marriage.

She further stated, though appellant used to visit the house of his daughter, he had a grouse against her for having married out of their caste. She had further deposed that appellant strangulated the deceased with the string of her petticoat which he had carried and the same was handed over by her to the police.

The Bombay High Court on August 6, 2019, confirmed the judgement and order of death sentence awarded by the trial court to him for strangulating his daughter to death.