A view of the Supreme Court of India. file | Photo credit: The Hindu
The Supreme Court on March 21 commuted the death sentence of a Tamil Nadu man for the kidnapping and murder of a seven-year-old boy, the only “male child” of his parents, after paying a ransom of ₹5 lakh for him. I was unable to release of the child.
Sundar alias Sundararajan was sentenced to death by the apex court 10 years ago in February 2013. However, five years later, in November 2018, the court agreed to review its decision to impose the death penalty.
On 21 March, a division bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud decided the review petition, saying “there was no reason to doubt his guilt in the offenses of kidnapping and murder”. The Chief Justice said that the crime, the murder of a child, was “horrible”.
However, the CJI, while reading out the judgement, noted that the courts had not considered the mitigating circumstances nor held a separate sentencing hearing before awarding the death sentence to the man.
Chief Justice Chandrachud said life imprisonment meant 14 years without the possibility of parole or remission. But it was not proportional. The court ordered Sundararajan, represented by advocate Ranjit Marar, to serve 20 years without any relief.
The February 2013 judgment argued that the boy’s death had caused “immense grief” to the parents. The boy would have carried on the family lineage and expected to see his parents through their old age, the Supreme Court upholding the death penalty.
The crime dates back to 2009 when the victim was stopped by the accused on her way to school. The prosecution’s version is that the convict informed the boy that his mother and grandmother were not well and he should accompany her to the hospital. Eyewitnesses said that the boy was last seen alive on the convict’s motorcycle.
Based on the complaint of the boy’s mother, the police had registered an FIR. The same day the mother got a call for a ransom of five lakhs. The mother immediately approached the police, who formed a team, went to the accused’s house and caught him along with another person.
The accused gave a confessional statement, from which three mobile phone sets were recovered, two of which had SIM cards. They admitted that when the ransom was not paid for the boy’s release, he was strangled. The dead body was stuffed in a sack and thrown into the water tank.
In 2013, a Supreme Court bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and JS Khehar confirmed the death penalty, noting that the convict had no value for human life, the murder of an innocent child and the manner in which the body was disposed of Showed cruel mentality.
The 2013 judgment authored by Justice Khehar had pointed out how “the parents of the deceased had four children – three daughters and one son. The abduction of the only boy was to create maximum fear in the mind of his parents”.
“The deliberate killing of an only boy has serious consequences for the parents of the deceased. The agony for the parents for losing their only boy, who would have carried on the family lineage, and the need to see them through their old age. There is hope, immeasurable,” Justice Khehar had said while classifying the offense as ‘rarest of rare’ deserving of capital punishment.