Gauhati High Court declines to confirm death sentence in double child-rape-murder, substitutes life without remission

In a Death Sentence Reference arising from the rape and murder of two minor girls in Kokrajhar, whose bodies were hung afterward to simulate suicide, the Gauhati High Court affirmed the conviction of three men under Sections 376D, 376DA, 376A, 120B and 302 of the Indian Penal Code, read with Section 6 of the POCSO Act, 2012 and provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, based on DNA matches linking each accused to the victims and medical evidence of peri-mortem hanging. But it declined to confirm the death sentence imposed by the trial court.

The Court held that gravity of the crime alone cannot justify the death penalty: life imprisonment remains the rule and death the exception, to be imposed only where reformation is unquestionably foreclosed, and the prosecution here had placed no material — on conduct in custody, antecedents or circumstances — showing that the accused could never reform. Invoking the Constitution Bench's recognition in Union of India v. Sriharan @ Murugan of a special category of sentence between ordinary life imprisonment and death, the Court substituted the death sentence with imprisonment for the remainder of each accused's natural life, without ordinary remission, expressly subject to the clemency powers of the President and Governor under Articles 72 and 161 of the Constitution.