MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court recently commuted the death penalty imposed on four persons to life imprisonment in a case pertaining to the murder of three SC men in Udappankulam village of Tenkasi in 2014.
A bench of Justices G Jayachandran and R Poornima observed that the prosecution failed to prove that the murder occurred due to communal hatred. The parameters laid down by the Supreme Court for imposing death penalty are not satisfied in this case, the judges added.
Moreover, the gravity of the offence mentioned is also not a case for capital punishment, they said and modified the death penalty imposed on Ponnumani, Gurusamy, Kaliraj alias Thangaraj, and Muthukrishnan to life sentence. The bench also confirmed the life sentence imposed on three more accused.
However, the bench acquitted four persons – Suresh and three others of the same name Kannan – in the case, as there was no evidence to prove their involvement except the conspiracy charge. The conviction under the latter was also found to be unsustainable by the high court owing to the improbable testimonies of the witnesses concerned, who were merely introduced to rope in innocent persons, the judges noted.
The bench wondered how the police filed a final report against 25 people when the key eyewitness stated that a mob of nine persons had hacked the three victims to death. The fact that one of them, V Kannan, has been suffering from night blindness for the last 30 years, was also not considered by the trial court, though the incident took place at 7.15 pm (on June 1, 2014), they added.
The bench took the decision on the Referred Trial case (when the death sentences are referred to the high court for approval) and two joint appeals filed by 11 people convicted in the case. According to the prosecution, on June 1, 2014, when the three victims – Kaliraj, Venugopal and Murugan – were travelling to Sankarankoil on their two-wheeler, a group of nine persons hacked them to death. Based on the statement of Kaliraj’s son, the police identified the nine persons. They also added 16 more people as accused through the statements of other witnesses using the conspiracy theory.