HC commutes death sentence imposed on youngster convicted for murdering neighbour

The Madras High Court on Wednesday commuted from death to life sentence the punishment imposed by a trial court on an unemployed youngster convicted for murdering his 54-year-old woman neighbour in a residential complex in Coimbatore before robbing her jewels, chopping her body into pieces, stuffing them into two suitcases and then letting them rot in his rented apartment for days together.

Justices P.N. Prakash and V. Sivagnanam, however, ordered that the convict J. Yasar Arafat must undergo imprisonment for a minimum period of 25 years without any remission since he had committed a crime against a defenceless woman, who was the age of his mother, just to rob her of the gold ornaments. They pointed out that the convicNANDt was 22-years-old when he murdered the woman on February 13, 2013. Differing with the view taken by the trial court that it was a rarest of rare cases warranting imposition of death penalty, the Division Bench said: “This is yet another run-of-the-mill case of murder for gain and nothing more or nothing less… It is not the case of the prosecution that the appellant went about sadistically dismembering a living person. The post-mortem certificates clearly show that Saroja’s death had occurred due to strangulation of her neck and all the other injuries have been found to be post-mortem and not ante-mortem ones.