Possibility Of His Reformation: Supreme Court Commutes Death Sentence Of Man Who Raped & Throttled His 6 Year-Old Step-Daughter To Death
The Court noting that the mother of the child as the sole witness, said, a mother would ordinarily be the last person to shield her child's murderer, and remarked that "she is a woman whose liberty is in the keeping of another".
The Supreme Court has commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of sexually assaulting his six-year-old step-daughter over several months and finally throttling her to death, holding that the State had failed to lead any evidence to show that he was incapable of reformation, a burden that, rests squarely upon the prosecution before the extreme penalty can be sustained. The Court found that notwithstanding the gravity of the crime, the absence of criminal antecedents, the convict's unblemished conduct in custody, and the State's silence on the question of incorrigibility together foreclosed the death sentence in favour of imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life.
While upholding the conviction, the Court also made pointed observations on the credibility of the child's mother, the sole eyewitness to the crime, who had testified against her own husband. Rejecting the suggestion that her continued presence in the matrimonial home undermined her account, the Bench held that a woman whose movements, contacts and access to a telephone are all regulated by her husband is "a woman whose liberty is in the keeping of another", and that a mother would ordinarily be the last person to falsely implicate an innocent man while shielding the actual killer of her own child.
A Bench of Justice Vikram Nath, Justice Sandeep Mehta and Justice Vijay Bishnoi observed, “…The burden of establishing that the appellant is beyond the possibility of reform, and is a continuing threat to society such that his life must be taken, lay upon the State, as Bachan Singh (Supra) holds. The State led no evidence whatever directed to that question. It placed nothing before the courts below, and nothing before us, to show that the appellant is incapable of reformation. On the other side, the material that is before us tells in favour of the possibility of reform, for the conduct of the appellant across eight years in custody has been satisfactory, he has been guilty of no institutional misconduct, and he has turned, so far as the confines of a prison permit, to self-improvement and to religious observance”.
“…A woman who can visit her parents only when her husband chooses to take her, and in his company, and who is retrieved by him in the evening, is not a woman at liberty. She is a woman whose liberty is in the keeping of another…She testifies against her own husband, and in doing so she renounces her marriage, forfeits the shelter and the maintenance that the marriage afforded her, exposes herself to the hostility of the family into which she married, and courts the social opprobrium that in the milieu to which she belongs attaches to a woman who breaks her home. That she was willing to endure all of this in order to accuse the appellant powerfully attests to her credibility. A mother is, in the considered view of this Court, ordinarily the last person who would shield the murderer of her own child and substitute an innocent man in his place”, the Bench categorically said.
Senior Advocate C.U. Singh appeared for the appellant, Bhupendra Pratap Singh, D.A.G appeared for the respondent.
“…When the mother of the victim entered upon her marriage with the appellant and brought her child into his home, the child was delivered into his protection, and the appellant stood towards her in the position of a guardian, of a father in the household in which she lived. The home ought to have been the safest place for the child, and the appellant ought to have been among those charged with her protection. Instead, the appellant made the home the site of her violation and made himself the author of it. The betrayal of the trust reposed in a guardian, and the transformation of the protector into the predator, is an aggravating circumstance of a high order, for it strikes not only at the child but at the security of the familial relation itself, upon which the safety of every child depends”, the Bench had noted in the judgment.
The prosecution's case was that the appellant, step-father of the victim, subjected the child to sustained and repeated sexual abuse within the household over several months following his marriage to her mother, culminating in a final assault on the night of April 21 2018.
Over the following two days, the child's condition deteriorated while the appellant withheld medical treatment, and on April 23 2018 he throttled her to death upon returning home, evidently to prevent disclosure of the abuse.
The Trial Court convicted the appellant under Sections 302, 376(2)(f), 376(2)(n), 376AB and 201 of the IPC, and Sections 5 and 6 of the POCSO Act, sentencing him to death for murder and aggravated penetrative sexual assault.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court confirmed the conviction and the death sentence. Before the Supreme Court, it emerged that the mother's cross-examination at trial had been conducted by legal aid counsel appointed the same day her deposition was recorded; the Court directed a further cross-examination in 2025, which it held cured the earlier prejudice.
On merits, the Court found the mother's testimony corroborated by medical evidence of homicidal death by throttling and a fresh genital injury, an extra-judicial confession, telephone records, and the child's own disclosure admissible under Section 32(1) of the Evidence Act.
The Court emphasized that sentencing courts cannot focus entirely on the gravity of the offense while completely disregarding the offender. By assigning zero weight to the "criminal test," a court abdicates its legal duty under Bachan Singh to weigh mitigating factors, such as deprivation, lack of priors, and good conduct, alongside the crime.
“…The High Court, in confirming the sentence of death, assessed what it described as the crime test at one hundred per cent and the criminal test at zero per cent. With respect, a criminal test assessed at zero is a proposition that can seldom be sustained, and it cannot be sustained in the present case. To assess the criminal test at zero is to assert that there is nothing whatever to be said on the side of the offender, that the balance sheet on his side is wholly blank. That is almost never true of any human being, and it is not true of the appellant, whose childhood deprivation, absence of prior convictions, satisfactory conduct in custody and other circumstances we have set out and accepted as genuine mitigation. A sentencing court that reduces the criminal test to zero has, in truth, declined to perform the weighing at all, for it has treated the gravity of the crime as though it discharged the court from the duty of considering the criminal. The error is not a mere infelicity of expression. It is the very error against which the whole of the sentencing jurisprudence of this Court has set its face, for the essential command of Bachan Singh (Supra) is that the criminal be weighed together with the crime, and a court that assigns the criminal a weight of zero has disobeyed that command…”, the Bench said.
Therefore, the conviction was affirmed; the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for the remainder of the appellant's natural life without remission.
Cause Title: Waris v. State of Madhya Pradesh (Neutral Citation: 2026 INSC 1050)
Appearances:
Appellant: C.U. Singh, Senior Advocate, Shreya Rastogi,. Niharika Srivastava, Katyayani Suhrud, Kaustubh Anshuraj, AOR, Bidya Mohanty, Abhishek Kalaiyarasan, Advocates.
Respondent: Bhupendra Pratap Singh, D.A.G., Abhimanyu Singh, Pashupathi Nath Razdan, AOR, Maitreyee Jagat Joshi, Astik Gupta, Akanksha Tomar, Advocates.