The Supreme Court on Tuesday commuted the death sentence of a man convicted for killing his children and in-laws, saying the hangman’s noose should be “taken off the convict’s neck”. The court, however, sentenced him to jail till the “end of his days”.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta upheld his conviction last month. It said the man shall now “await his natural end, without remission, in the confines of a penitentiary.”
The court said the convict Naika, a former bank manager, had no criminal record. The trial court didn’t take into account all the mitigating circumstances before holding the crime to be “rarest of rare”, it added.
In 2010, the man murdered both his sister in-law and mother in-law and dumped their bodies in a septic tank of his house. The next day, he went to a garden and drowned them in a water tank.
Justice Karol, who authored the verdict on behalf of the bench, said the barbarity of the crime hadn’t “escaped us, or we, in anyway have condoned such a hideous act”.
He said Naika killed his sister-in-law because she had fallen in love with a person from a different caste.
“Whom a person falls in love with, is not within the human sphere of control – the former (sister in-law) fell in love with her colleague…who was her co-worker, and who incidentally was from a different caste. When told to break off her relationship with him for that reason, she couldn’t. Her sister (wife of Naika) and her mother, the latter, both supported their near and dear ones in pursuing their desires. We see nothing wrong with that,” the verdict added.
The court said had he heeded the advice of his wife to not interfere in her sister-in-law’s personal matters, he would have lived a happy life.
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“It is sad that such a restrictive world-view on part of the appellant-convict became the reason for these senseless acts of violence and depravity. Had he heeded the advice of PW-2 (wife of Naika), when she told him not to interfere in (sister in-law’s) personal matters, he could have gone on to live a perfectly happy life,” the bench added.
Naika and his wife were both bank managers posted in Solapur and Mangalore, respectively. They had a son and a daughter.
With inputs from PTI