19, Jan 2016

Jan 19 2016 : The Times of India (Mumbai)
Dhananjay Mahapatra
New Delhi:

Issues Notices To Maharashtra, Delhi On Appeals By Two Rapists
The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the execution of two condemned prisoners—one from Mumbai and the other from Delhi—who were awarded death sentence for sexually assaulting young girls before killing them.
A bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur issued notices to the Maharashtra and Delhi governments on appeals filed by the two convicts — Prakash Nishad from Mumbai and Vinod from Delhi. The death sentence awarded to 24-year-old Nishad was confirmed by the Bombay high court, when it found evidence to uphold his conviction for raping, sodomizing and then brutally murdering a six-year-old girl in Bhayender in 2010.
Observing that society, especially after the Nirbhaya case, sought tough punishment for those who sexually assaulted women, a division bench of the HC held that Nishad, originally a resident of Uttar Pradesh, should hang till death for his crime. A sessions court in November 2014 had convicted Nishad for committing rape, unnatural sex and murder and sentenced him to death.
The HC had said, “The pain and agony the accused must have caused to the deceased minor girl is beyond imagination and is the limit of viciousness. The motivation of the accused, the vulnerability of the victim girl, the barbaric and inhuman nature of the crime and the execution thereof persuade us to hold that this is a `rarest of rare’ case where the sentence of death is eminently desirable not only to deter others from committing such atrocious crimes and to prevent the accused from committing such acts for all times to come.“