NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court today reserved its judgement on the trial court's reference for confirmation of capital punishment given to two death convicts in the 2009 Jigisha Ghosh murder case.
A bench of Justices S Muralidhar and I S Mehta concluded hearing arguments and reserved its verdict on the appeals of the two death row convicts and another convict, challenging the trial court's conviction and sentence in the case.
While convicts Ravi Kapoor and Amit Shukla were handed down the death penalty, the third offender Baljeet Malik was given a reprieve from the gallows for his good conduct in jail and awarded life imprisonment by the lower court.
The sessions judge had last year sent the case records relating to the conviction and death sentence of Kapoor and Shukla to the high court.
It is mandatory for a trial court to refer a death penalty case to a high court for confirmation of the sentence within 30 days of the pronouncement of the verdict.
The trial court had on July 14, 2016, held the duo guilty for the murder of IT executive Jigisha Ghosh and other counts.
While sentencing the two to death, the trial court had said the 28-year-old woman was killed in a "cold-blooded, inhuman and cruel manner" and "brutally mauled to death".
It had said the magnitude and brutality exhibited by the convicts made the case 'rarest of rare', warranting capital punishment for Kapoor and Shukla.
Kapoor and Shukla in their appeal claimed the trial court has "wrongly held that the case falls in the category of rarest of rare".
Malik, challenging his conviction and sentence of life term through his counsel Amit Kumar, had said the trial court judge had "failed to appreciate that there were contradictions and discrepancies in the depositions of prosecution witnesses (PWs) and, therefore conviction and the sentence awarded to him is liable to be set aside".
The trial court had imposed varying fines on them.
The trio are also facing trial for the murder of TV journalist Soumya Viswanathan, killed a year before Jigisha.
The trial court had held the three guilty under several sections of IPC, including murder, abducting for murder, destruction of evidence, voluntarily causing hurt in committing robbery, forgery for purpose of cheating and using as genuine a forged document.
It had held that the charge of criminal conspiracy could not be proved against them.
The police had filed the charge sheet in the case in June 2009, stating that Jigisha's post-mortem report had revealed that she was killed by smothering. The trial in the case began in April 2010.
Recovery of the weapon allegedly used in Jigisha's murder had led to cracking of the murder case of Soumya Vishwanathan, who was a journalist with a news channel.
Soumya was shot dead on September 30, 2008 while she was returning home in her car from office in the wee hours.
The police had claimed robbery as the motive behind the killings of both Jigisha and Soumya.