By Rana Ajit, IANS,
New Delhi : India appears to be catching up with the global trend of decades-long imprisonments, with the Supreme Court handing down a lifelong jail term to a Kerala paedophile in the third such sentencing since July.
The apex court had devised the novel lifelong jail term in July this year to meet the need for punishment that was milder than the death penalty but harsher than the normal 14-year life term. This, it said, was required in cases of murders most foul but which fall short of the “rarest of rare” category for which the death penalty is approved.
In Western countries like the US, Britain and Canada, jail terms ranging from 50 years to 90 years are not uncommon.
The latest instance of a lifelong jail term being handed down in India came Oct 9. A bench of Justice H.S. Bedi and J.M. Panchal imposed it on 28-year-old Kerala native Sebastian alias Chevithiyan while setting aside his death penalty for stealing a two-year-old girl child from her sleeping mother’s side and bludgeoning her to death after raping her.
The bench jailed Sebastian for a term lasting his natural life span, taking into account “the evidence of his being a paedophile with extremely violent propensities”. The court noted that Sebastian had committed the crime while being out on bail, pending his appeal against conviction in more than one case of rape and killing of young children between 1998 and 2005.
The court also noted that he had raped and killed the two-year-old girl three days after July 28, 2005, when he was granted the benefit of doubt and acquitted in another set of cases involving the rape and murder of several children.
The bench imposed the lifelong jail term on Sebastian, saying “his continuance as a member of an ordered society is uncalled for.”
It condemned Sebastian to prison till his last breath, relying upon the penology principles spelt out July 22 by a bench dealing with the murder committed by godman Swamy Shraddhananda.
The Swamy had earlier been given the death sentence by a Karnataka court for burying alive his wife Shakereh in 1992 in their Bangalore house to usurp her massive property. Shakereh, belonging to a princely state of Karnataka, had married the swamy after leaving her diplomat husband.
Swamy’s death sentence was endorsed by the Karnataka High Court but on an appeal by him, a two-judge bench of the apex court yielded a split verdict with one approving the death penalty but the other recommending life sentence.
The novel, lifelong jail term punishment was finally devised by the apex court’s three-judge bench led by Justice B.N. Agrawal, while dealing with the split verdict in Swamy’s case. The bench specifically barred the government from granting remission to the convict at any point of his life in jail.
“The formalisation of a special category of sentences, though for a few cases, shall have the great advantage of having the death penalty on the statute book but to actually use it as little as possible, really in the rarest of the rare cases,” Justice Agrawal’s bench said.
“This would also be in accordance with modern global trends in the penology of long sentences,” it said.
In keeping with this principle, another bench of Justice V.S. Sirpurkar and Justice Deepak Verma on Aug 27 this year imposed a 35-year-long jail term on a West Bengal youth, Haru Ghosh, for murdering a 30-year-old woman and her 12-year-old son in May 2005.
The apex court awarded a 35-year-long jail term to Ghosh, while specifically barring the state government from remitting his sentence or granting parole to him. The court did so while setting aside the death penalty awarded to him.
(Rana Ajit can be contacted at [email protected])