MADURAI: Madras high court has confirmed the conviction and life sentence imposed on a man for murdering his paramour over an altercation in Tirunelveli in 2016. The prosecution said appellant Marimuthu was married to Saratha Rani and has two children. When he was working in Tirupur, he met the deceased Kavitha and was living with her. He also had a child with her.
Thereafter, he went abroad, but on returning, he chose to live with his wife Saratha Rani. An agitated Kavitha went to his house on October 12, 2016 and insisted that he take care of her. The appellant promised to take Kavitha to his mother’s house. When they were walking towards the house, an altercation ensured and the appellant attacked Kavitha with a billhook causing her death. Pettai police regsistered a case and arrested Marimuthu. In 2019 the trial court convicted and sentenced him to life imprisonment for offence under Section 302 (murder) of IPC. Challenging it, he had filed the present criminal appeal.
A division bench of Justices P N Prakash and R Hemalatha observed that the appellant claimed that Kavitha’s death was a ‘murder for gain’ by unknown people when she went to a public toilet. However, since the jewellery worn by her was intact, it is clear that it was not so. The judges observed that the postmortem report, which mentions the extent of injuries on the victim’s body, clearly shows the intensity of the attack by the appellant. All the witnesses have deposed the sequence of events and there is no good ground to discard their evidence as they withstood the testimony of cross-examination. Hence the judges observed that there was no reason to interfere with the conviction and sentence passed by the trial court.
