BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday dismissed a petition filed by serial rapist-murderer Umesh Reddy questioning the rejection of his mercy plea by the President of India.
Upholding the President’s order, a division bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and Pradeep Singh Yerur, however, continued the stay granted for execution of death penalty for another six weeks to provide an opportunity to BA Umesh aka Umesh Reddy to file an appeal before the Supreme Court against the dismissal of his petition. This was after Reddy’s counsel requested the court to extend the stay granted on October 20, 2016.
The Supreme Court had confirmed Reddy’s death sentence for rape and murder of Jayashri Maradi Subbayya in 1998. First, Reddy filed a petition in 2016 questioning the delay in considering his mercy plea by the President and Governor and sought commutation of his death sentence to imprisonment for life. The court said there was no delay in considering his plea by the President and rejected his petition. He cited ‘avoidable and excessive delay’ of over two years in the disposal of his mercy petition and consequent mental illness. Citing that the Supreme Court had recognised such factors in the Shatrughan Chauhan vs Union of India case, the petition said these are independently sufficient to render the death sentence inexecutable.
Reddy also contended that he was kept in solitary confinement from the date of the trial court judgment, and developed serious mental illness during that time.
“Each of these facts are relevant to decide the mercy petition and yet they were not communicated to the President or Governor. This vitiated their decision to reject the mercy petition,” Reddy’s counsel argued, stating that the Supreme Court and high courts had commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in several such cases.
Reddy, who had several aliases, was a former CRPF constable and hails from Chitradurga district. He was convicted back-to-back for raping and murdering women who were staying alone in Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi and Davanagere in Karnataka, Mumbai and Pune in Maharastra and also in Gujarat.
Though he had given cops the slip several times since 1997, he was arrested in 2002 near Bengaluru’s Yeshwanthpur Railway Station. He was sentenced to death by the sessions court in October 2006 which was upheld by the High Court in 2009 and the Supreme Court in 2011.