Supreme Court of India.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has refused to entertain an appeal by two convicts against their sentence of life imprisonment for kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl in 2019 on the pretext of taking her to a picnic.
On Tuesday, a bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Manmohan rejected the appeal of convicts Sanjay Paikra and Pustam Yadav.
The appellants had moved the apex court challenging the judgment of the Chhattisgarh High Court.
The bench said that this is a very serious case and the accused kidnapped and raped a minor school girl.
“After hearing counsel for the petitioner, we are not inclined to interfere with impugned order passed by the High Court. Accordingly, the Special Leave Petition is dismissed. Pending applications, if any, shall stand disposed of," the bench said.
The court declined to accept the contention that the girl was a consenting party and did not raise any alarm during the period when she was kept in solitary confinement.
In August, 2024, the high court had upheld the trial court's judgment convicting Paikra, Yadav and third accused Santosh Kumar Gupta, the school van driver, in the sensational kidnapping and rape case under various provisons of the IPC and the POCSO Act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act) for offences of kidnaping and raping a class VII student.
In October 2021, the trial court had convicted the three accused and sentenced them to life imprisonment besides imposing a fine of Rs 1,000 on them under Section 6 of the POCSO Act which deals with the punishment for aggravated penetrative sexual assault.
They were also handed down varying jail terms for other offences including kidnapping. An FIR was lodged by the survivor and her mother with the police on November 18, 2019.