The Madras High Court has commuted to life, the death sentence imposed on a former professor of business administration for having murdered his wife at an apartment in Anna Nagar here on December 16, 2012. He had smashed her head with a mortar and then slit her throat with a kitchen knife following a domestic quarrel.
A Division Bench of Justices P.N. Prakash and R.N. Manjula found the convict V. Kannan, now 50, guilty of having committed the ghastly crime but did not find it to be a rarest of rare case warranting capital punishment. Terming it to be a run-of-the-mill case, the judges said it did not warrant the convict to be sent to the gallows.
“It has not been demonstrated to us that Kannan is addicted to crime and that he is a menace to society, thereby ruling out any possibility of reformation,” the Bench said while passing common orders on a statutory reference made by the trial court as well as an independent criminal appeal preferred by the convict.
The judges said the convict had killed his wife when their 13-year-old daughter was asleep. Thereafter, he called his father in Salem.
Rajagopal, in turn, took the assistance of his tenants to reach the spot and on the way, they informed the police. During the course of trial, the convict’s father turned hostile. The convict, in turn, accused Rajagopal of having murdered his wife when she resisted his sexual overtures. Holding that the trial court had rejected such accusation, the Bench said the testimony of the convict’s daughter went directly against him.
