Thaindian News

New Delhi, Oct 6 (IANS) The Supreme Court Wednesday reduced the death penalty given to Santosh Kumar Singh to life sentence in the 1996 rape and murder of Delhi University law student Priyadarshini Mattoo.

The court, however, dismissed Singh’s appeal challenging his conviction by the Delhi High Court in 2006.

“To our mind the balance sheet tilts marginally in favour of the appellant (Singh), and the ends of justice would be met if the sentence awarded to him was commuted from death to life imprisonment,” an apex court bench of Justice Harjit Singh Bedi and Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad said in the judgment.

Speaking for the bench, Justice Bedi said: “Undoubtedly the sentencing part is a difficult one and often exercises the mind of the court.”

If there is a limited option of awarding life sentence or a death sentence, and the court itself is in some difficulty to decide then “it is only appropriate that the lesser sentence should be awarded”, he said.

Dealing with the mitigating circumstances warranting reduction in sentence, the judgment said that the high court had reversed the trial court verdict of acquittal based on circumstantial evidence.

At the time of the incident, Singh was a young man of 24 years and after his acquittal by the trial court he got married and was a father of a girl child, and there was nothing to suggest that he was not capable of reforming, the judgment said.

The apex court said that undoubtedly the appellant (Santosh Kumar Singh) must have reflected on the events in the last 15 years, including the death of his father within a year of his conviction and the prospect of a dismal future for his young family.

Singh, a lawyer practising at Delhi courts and son of a former senior police officer J.P. Singh, was sent to the gallows by the high court in October 2006. He obtained his law degree in 1994 from the university’s campus law centre.

Mattoo - a final year student of law at the centre - was strangled Jan 23, 1996 at her uncle’s flat in Vasant Kunj here. The case was investigated by the CBI.

Referring to the convict, the judgment said: “In particular we notice the tendency of the parents to be over indulgent to their progeny often resulting in the most horrendous situations”.

These situations are exacerbated “when an accused belongs to a category with unlimited power or pelf or even more dangerously, a volatile and heady cocktail of two”, the court said.

“The reality that such a class does exist is for all to see and is evidenced by regular and alarming incidents such as the present one,” the court said.