Reva Khetrapal, J.

1. In an epoch when sexual assaults and ravishments are the order of day, when young men (and even old ones) revel in public declaration of their promiscuous pursuits, when not only the streets but schools, colleges and work-places are approached by the vulnerable with trepidation and even the judge has to be sensitized to gender issues, the rape of a young girl hardly out of her teens, would have gone unnoticed as scores of other violations of infants, girls and women, but for fact that a public outraged at the manner in which the entrails of the ravished were culled out of her body, leaving her to die, stripped of all human dignity, completely unattired, in the darkness of a wintry night, on a thoroughfare, took to the streets in their quest for justice. This had the trigger effect of impelling the investigative agencies into using such tools of investigation as had lain in their tool-kit hitherto before practically unused, to nail the culprits. Did they indeed manage to foist the guilt on the guilty is the subject matter of the present death reference and appeals. But before delving any further into this arena, it is deemed appropriate to delineate th