Bombay High Court sets aside death penalty in rape and murder case; acquits accused of murder, upholds rape charge

The Bombay High Court recently quashed the death sentence of a man convicted of killing and raping a teenager on the ground that the accusation of murder could not be proven [Ashok Baban Mukane vs The State of Maharashtra].A Bench of Justices Sadhana Jadhav and Prithwiraj Chavan while hearing a confirmation plea of a death sentence along with an appeal against the same sentence, ruled that while the accusation of rape was proven beyond all reasonable doubts, the prosecution failed to establish the charge of murder. As a result, it held that the case does not meet the criterion of the rarest of rare cases, as held by the sessions court.The Court, therefore, set aside the death sentence but upheld the sentence of life imprisonment handed down by the trial court for rape..The incident occurred on September 5, 2013, as the victim was returning home. According to the prosecution, she was walking along the railway lines when the accused approached her and raped her. After she resisted him, he supposedly killed her by hitting her on the head with a blunt object.The Additional Sessions Judge convicted him for murder and rape and sentenced him to death for the offence of murder and life imprisonment for the offence of rape.This led to the present appeal before the High Court. .After being convinced that the deceased was murdered and raped, the court reasoned that, because the murder weapon could not be retrieved and there were no signs of resistance on the accused, the two offences may have been perpetrated by different individuals.“There is every possibility of committing rape upon the victim when either she was unconscious or there is every possibility of she being brutally assaulted by someone else before she was subjected to rape by the appellant,” Justice Chavan’s judgement read.The Court determined that there was no clear evidence presented by the prosecution to show that the appellant was the one who inflicted injuries on the victim, such as suffocation, neck compression, or striking her on the head with a hard and blunt item..The bench held that the sessions court erred in convicting the accused of the offence of murder in the absence of convincing and satisfactory evidence on record. “No doubt, in normal circumstances, one may be compelled to think or presume that due to resistance from the victim while attempting to commit rape, the appellant might have smothered her face with a bag or throttled her neck resulting into her death. However, as already stated, in the absence of any marks or bruises or abrasions on the person of the appellant, it is difficult to reach such conclusion. Moreover, the Investigating Officer had failed to produce hard and blunt object alleged to have been used in giving blows over the head of the victim,” the Court noted.The Court further remarked that if the bag had been used to smother the victim, there would have been some evidence in the form of saliva or other liquid sticking to it, and thus disregarded the idea of the appellant smothering her..It, therefore, concluded that the prosecution failed to establish any nexus between the death of the victim and the appellant and therefore, set aside the appellant's conviction of the offence of murder under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. The conviction for rape under section 376(1) of the IPC was maintained and the convict was directed to serve the sentence for the same.The District Legal Services Authority, Thane, was ordered to pay ₹5 lakh in compensation to the victim's mother within six months, and the plea was dismissed.Advocate Shashikant Chaudhari along with advocates Snehal S. Chaudhari, Pranot Pawar and Gyanprakash R. Pal appeared for the appelant. APP Veera Shinde appeared for the State..[Read Judgment]