JOIN USCrimes against women call for harshest punishment: SC
“Crimes against women are not ordinary crimes committed in a fit of anger or for property,” said the Supreme Court’s bench of justices Markandeya Katju and Gyan Sudha Mishra while asking Sukhdev Singh from Punjab to file his reply to the query.
Singh had been awarded life sentence by a sessions court for strangling his wife Daljit Kaur and later trying to destroy the evidence by burning the body.
Social crimes
“These are social crimes. They disrupt the entire social fabric and call for harshest possible punishment,” the apex court observed.
“In our opinion, the nature of the crime which has been committed in the present case outrages the modern conscience and it belongs to the rarest of the rare category deserving capital punishment,” the court observed.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court had also upheld the sessions court judgment after holding him guilty for the murder.
Singh has challenged the ruling of the high court before the Supreme court.
Brutal and barbaric
“In our opinion, this is a clear case of brutal and barbaric murder of Daljit Kaur. According to the forensic evidence by Dr Ranjit Singh, the deceased was first strangled and thereafter burnt. “The doctor’s report shows that some of her neck bones had been fractured and there was bleeding. In our prima facie opinion, these could clearly not be self-inflicted injuries. There were also burns all over the body,” the bench remarked while dismissing the claim of Singh that his wife had committed suicide.
After going through the case file, the bench observed that there was evidence that Daljit was being ill-treated by Singh and police have recorded that he used to often beat her.