Bombay High Court Commutes: Death Sentence To Life Sentence
Bombay High Court Commutes: Death Sentence To Life Sentence
The Bombay High Court commuted to life imprisonment a 24-year-old Bhiwandi resident’s death sentence for killing a four-year-old girl in April 2018 after her father slapped the convict for failing to clear his 1,500 dues.
“The appellant’s case does not fall into the category of the rarest of rare cases,” a division bench of justices Sadhana Jadhav and Prithviraj Chavan ruled. It went on to say that Mohammed Aaded Mohammed Ajmir Shaikh, a power loom worker, was not a hardened criminal and that he hoped to be reformed, rehabilitated, and reintegrated into society.
The girl went missing in April 2018, and her partially decomposed body with a head injury was discovered three days later. Her hands and right thigh had been hacked.
Shaikh, who was apprehended in his native Bihar, was convicted of raping and killing the girl in March 2019 and sentenced to death. The high court concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the rape charge. It upheld his murder conviction, primarily because of his “extrajudicial” confession to his roommate.
The bench said, “An extra-judicial confession cannot be read with arithmetic precision.” “All that needs to be seen is that it was not induced to divulge the commission of an offence by threat, coercion, or any other compulsion.”
