MUMBAI: At a death confirmation hearing for three men convicted as repeat offenders in the Shakti Mills gangrape cases of 2013, the state, through its special public prosecutor Deepak Salvi, said that the law amended that year is clear and permits the noose for a “second conviction”.
Disagreeing with the interpretation of the law under Section 376E of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which introduced death penalty for a second conviction to a repeat offender of rape as submitted by the convicts’ counsel Yug Chaudhry, Salvi said that only conviction after a conviction is the requirement of law, “sequence and time of the offence is immaterial”. Chaudhry had submitted that the law mandates a prior conviction before the commission of the second offence, for which if convicted, death sentence was contemplated under IPC Section 376 E. It cannot be invoked in a scenario where two crimes have occurred, but tried simultaneously, as in this matter, before the HC, Chaudhry had added.
In the hearing before the HC bench of Justices Sadhana Jadhav and P K Chavan, Salvi, however, referred to and relied on a US court ruling Deal vs United States which had upheld an enhanced punishment for subsequent conviction.
The US judgment had said that “present statute does not use the term ‘offence’, and so does not require a criminal act after the first conviction; it merely requires a conviction after the first conviction”. Salvi drew a parallel to language of IPC Section 376E which stipulates: “Whoever has been previously convicted of an offence punishable under Section 376 (rape) ….or Section 376D (gangrape)…and is subsequently convicted of an offence punishable under any of the said sections shall be punished with imprisonment for life which shall mean imprisonment for the remainder of that person's natural life, or with death.”
A 22-year-old photojournalist was raped in August 2013, at the defunct Shakti Mills compound at Mahalaxmi by five persons, including a minor. A 19-year-old telephone operator too then complained of being gangraped on the same premises. The accused were mostly the same. On March 20, 2014, the sessions judge first held three common accused guilty for the gangrape of the telephone operator and minutes later pronounced them guilty for the gangrape of the photojournalist. The trio was given the death sentence in April 2014.
