The Supreme Court on Friday sentenced two men to life imprisonment for kidnapping and murder of an eight-year-old son of a doctor in 2014 in Nagpur for the purpose of becoming rich with the ransom money.
A bench of Justices U U Lalit, Indu Malhotra, and Hemant Gupta, however, modified the death sentence awarded to convicts Rajesh Daware and Arvind Singh by the trial court and confirmed by the Bombay High Court.
"The motive of the accused to take life was to become rich by not doing hard work but by demanding ransom after kidnapping a young, innocent boy of eight years," the bench said.
The court, however, said the case fell short of the “rarest of rare” cases where a death sentence alone deserved to be awarded to the appellants.
It decided to impose a special sentence of imprisonment till the end of the life on the duo with a direction that there should not be any remission until they completed 25 years of imprisonment.
According to the prosecution, both Daware and Singh, B Com students, used to work at the nursing home run by Dr. Mukesh Chandak. They decided to kidnap their employer's son to earn quick money. They had killed the boy by smashing his face by stones. They were caught on the basis of CCTV footage as well as phone call records, as they demanded Rs 10 crore as ransom.
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