President shouldn't pardon paedophile murderers, says PIL

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court admitted a Public Interest Litigation challenging the Presidential pardon accorded to five paedophile rapist-murderers, seeking that the death penalty awarded to the five be reinstated. It also urged for clear guidelines and legal principles on which the power of the President to commute deaths sentences is to be exercised. The petition, filed by author Pinki Virani, was admitted by the apex court on Monday. The SC has sought a response from the Government of India. [caption id=“attachment_124038” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The PIL seeks justice for victims’ families. Representational image.[/caption] The petition seeks capital punishment for five men convicted of raping and murdering children in four different cases, as was awarded by courts before the convicts received presidential pardon exercised under Article 72 of the Constitution by President Pratibha Patil. “The Petitioner makes an urgent plea that the death penalty be reinstituted on these five paedophile rapist-killers and they be hanged. The innocent souls of the four children - one little boy and three girls – these five killers have mauled with cold-blooded savagery, deserve this justice,” the PIL says. The first of the four cases is of Molai Ram, a jail guard in Madhya Pradesh, who along with a prisoner serving a sentence for rape assaulted and gangraped the 16-year-old daughter of the assistant jailor before throwing her body into the jail’s septic tank along with her bicycle. They then misled people into believing that she had gone out with a friend on the bicycle. Molai and the other convict, Santosh Yadav, were given the maximum penalty in 1998. The SC confirmed the sentence in 1999. IN 2011, President Pratibha Patil passed an order commuting the death sentence to life imprisonent. The second case pertains to a 1996 incident in which a nine-year-old boy named Chirku was decapitated in Jharkhand as a religious sacrifice. The convict, Sushil Murmu, was given the death sentence in 2002. While upholding the death sentence, the Supreme Court made this observation: “A bare look at the fact situation of this case shows that the appellant was not possessed of the basic humanness and he completely lacks the psyche or mindset which can be amenable for any reformation. He had at the time of occurrence a child of the same age as the victim and yet he diabolically designed in a most dastardly and revolting manner to sacrifice a very hapless and helpless child of another for personal gain and to promote his fortunes by pretending to appease the deity. The brutality of the act is amplified by the grotesque and revolting manner in which the helpless child’s head was severed. Even if the helpless and imploring face and voice of the innocent child did not arouse any trace of kindness in the heart of the accused, the nonchalant way in which he carried the severed head in a gunny bag and threw it in the pond unerringly shows that the act was diabolic of the most superlative degree in conception, and cruel in execution”. Murmu’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2012 by President Pratibha Patil. In the third case, a six-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh on her way to school in August 2001. Her body was found in a sugarcane field the following day. The convict named Satish was given the death penalty in 2002, acquitted by the High Court but then again awarded the death penalty by the SC in 2005. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Pratibha Patil in 2012. The final case pertains to the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh. The convict, a man named Bantu, who had given the child a balloon, later took her to a field, raped her and then proceeded to shove fully grown stems of a plant into the girl’s body, when he was caught completely naked. The petition says doctors had to remove the stem from the child’s vagina during the post-mortem – 24 cm of the stick was protruding out, a 33-cm portion had been inserted inside, the savagery had ruptured the victim’s uterus and intestines. Awarded the death sentence in 2005, Bantu’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Pratibha Patil in 2012. Virani’s petition seeks that the Supreme Court set aside the order of commutation of death sentence and reinstitute the maximum penalty for all these five convicts and that a date be set for the execution. The PIL seeks enforcement of the fundamental rights of citizens under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, which guarantees protection of life and personal liberty and also the right of the victims and their near and dear ones. [caption id=“attachment_124038” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Author Pinki Virani[/caption] Asked what prompted her to take up the issue, Virani told Firstpost, “There is a social crises in India today because the rights of the victim of the crime and also society at large – including tax-payers because of whose contribution to the exchequer rapist-murderers continue to enjoy jail-privileges – are not given full weightage by executive wings of governance. The punishment must be about the crime. Otherwise, the only ones who benefit are the perpetrators of it, potential ones included. Hence the present Petition.” Seeking guidelines on the exercise of the the Presidential power of pardon power under Article 72 of the Constitution, the PIL says this right is “vitiated by the advise given by the Council of Ministers to the President” as such advice is not based on any legal principles and is often arbitrary. The heinous nature of the offence has been ignored in all the four cases, it contends, going on to say that the power of pardon can be exercised only in the rarest of rare cases. It says the presence of the convicts “even inside the jail” is a menace to society and could put other children at risk if they are released on parole for even the briefest of periods. It also contends that the pardon has a demoralizing effect on the victims’ relatives apart from sending out the message that criminals can get away with rape and murder, “that too against minor defenseless children”. Interestingly, the petition goes on to contend that the power of pardon conferred on the President under Article 72 of the Constitution is not beyond judicial review. The power must be exercised only in the rarest of rare cases, always under a set of “Definite Legal Principles”, the petition says. An objective analysis of the case must inspire a belief amongst the Council of Ministers as well as the President that there was an aberration in the application of the “rarest of rare” principle in awarding the death sentence, the petition says.