Supreme Court Commutes Death Sentence of Man Who Raped, Killed 6-Year-Old Stepdaughter

The Supreme Court on Thursday commuted the death sentence of a man convicted of repeatedly raping and murdering his six-year-old stepdaughter, while upholding his conviction. A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta, and Vijay Bishnoi ruled that the State had failed to prove that the convict was beyond the possibility of reformation, a prerequisite for imposing the death penalty. The Court instead sentenced him to imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life without remission.

The Crime and Conviction

The appellant, Waris, married the victim's mother in August 2017. Within months, he began sexually abusing the child, ultimately raping her on the night of April 21, 2018. When the child's condition deteriorated, he refused medical treatment. On April 23, he throttled her to death. The post-mortem revealed asphyxia due to throttling and a fresh genital injury indicative of sexual assault. The trial court convicted him and imposed the death penalty, which was confirmed by the Madhya Pradesh High Court.

Arguments on Appeal

The appellant argued that the sole eyewitness, the victim's mother, was unreliable due to omissions and contradictions in her statements. The State countered that her testimony was corroborated by medical evidence, the child's dying declaration, and call records. On sentence, the appellant submitted that the case did not fall within the "rarest of rare" category, pointing to mitigating circumstances including childhood deprivation and no criminal antecedents. The State contended that the crime was exceptionally grave due to the sustained sexual abuse and the killing of the child to silence her—a factor the Court termed "instrumental silencing."

Legal Analysis and Key Holdings

The Supreme Court first addressed the issue of the deficient cross-examination of the mother at trial. It directed a further cross-examination in 2025, which it held cured the defect. The Court then examined the evidence and found the mother's testimony reliable, noting that the core of her account was corroborated by the medical evidence, the child's disclosure, and objective call records.

On sentence, the Court applied the Bachan Singh framework and criticized the High Court's approach of assessing the " crime test at 100% and criminal test at 0% ." The Court observed that this effectively treated the offender's circumstances as irrelevant. "A sentencing court that reduces the criminal test to zero has, in truth, declined to perform the weighing at all," the judgment stated.

The Court found that the mitigating circumstances were genuine and substantial: the appellant lost his mother at age seven, grew up in poverty, had no criminal antecedents, and maintained satisfactory conduct in prison. Crucially, the State led no evidence to prove that the appellant was beyond reform. A psychological evaluation found no condition from which incorrigibility could be inferred.

The Court acknowledged the " instrumental silencing " of the child—killed to conceal the rape—as an exceptional aggravating factor , but held that it did not, by itself, establish incorrigibility . "A crime may be exceptionally grave and its perpetrator may yet not be shown to be beyond reform, and where that is so the law, as it has recently been applied, does not exact his life," the Court observed.

Key Observations

The judgment included several significant observations:

  • "The aggravating feature distinguishes the crime, but it does not distinguish the criminal in the respect that matters to the choice of sentence."
  • "The intermediate sentence of imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life, without remission , is available and is adequate to answer the gravity of the crime."
  • "It is a sentence proportionate to the gravity of his crime, and it reflects the abhorrence with which the law regards what he did, while stopping short of the taking of his life in a case in which the possibility of his reformation has not been foreclosed ."

The Final Decision

The Supreme Court upheld the conviction under Sections 302, 376(2)(f), 376(2)(n), 376AB, and 201 of the Indian Penal Code and Sections 5 and 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act . It commuted the death sentence to imprisonment for the remainder of the appellant's natural life without remission . The Court held that an ordinary life sentence with remission after 14 years would be "wholly inadequate" for such a crime, but the death sentence could not be sustained because the State had not excluded the possibility of reformation . The substituted sentence was described as "a sentence of the utmost severity, second only to the sentence of death ," reflecting both the gravity of the offence and the limits the law places on capital punishment.