HYDERABAD: In a historic judgment delivered in less than a year, a POCSO court on Wednesday sentenced a 62-year-old man to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment for sexually abusing a minor. The accused, M Jagan, had called his four-and-a-half-year-old neighbour to his house while she was playing outdoors, and sexually abused her on October 25, 2018. The judgment, which disposed the case in record time, was pronounced by the First Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge, Suneetha Kunchala, at the POCSO court in Bharosa Centre.
Jagan, who worked as a dry cleaner at Laldarwaza, was found guilty in October last year, and convicted under Section 376AB of the IPC, for rape of a girl under the age of 12. This is the first judgment in Telangana delivered as per the new amendment, which prescribes death sentence for offences committed against children under the age of 12. The imprisonment of 20 years, in this case, would translate to a death sentence.
The court did not adopt a lenient stance, considering the accused’s age, and applied Section 42 of the POCSO Act and Criminal Law Amendment Act 2018, with the punishment for the offence seen under Section 376AB of the IPC. The punishment under Section 376AB, which was introduced in 2018, is harsher than that prescribed under Section 6 of the POCSO Act. It may extend to imprisonment for life, which shall mean imprisonment for the remainder of that person’s natural life.
The convict was said to be a habitual offender.