"Hangman's Noose Not To Be Taken Off": Top Court Commutes Death Penalty

Directing the hangman's noose to be "taken off the convict's neck", the Supreme Court ordered a death row prisoner to remain in jail "till the end of his days given by god almighty".

A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta therefore commuted the death penalty of the man who killed his minor children.

While partially allowing Ramesh A Naika's appeal against the death sentence, the bench upheld his conviction on February 13 and said, "Appellant-convict's conviction for the murders of..., is maintained, but he shall now await his natural end, without remission, in the confines of a penitentiary." The top court observed Naika, a former bank manager had no criminal antecedents, and said not all the mitigating circumstances were considered by the trial court while holding the crime to be "rarest of rare".

Justice Karol, who authored the verdict on behalf of the bench, said, "We should not even for a moment be taken to understand that the barbarity of the crime, the helplessness of the two children who met the most unfortunate of ends, and that too at the hands of the very person who bore half the responsibility of bringing them into the world, has escaped us, or we, in any way have condoneHangman's d such a hideous act.." Naika was stated to have also killed his sister in-law for falling in love with a person of different caste and his mother in-law for "no fault of theirs" and was convicted and sentenced separately.

"Whom a person falls in love with, is not within the human sphere of control - the former (sister in-law) fell in love with her colleague...who was her co-worker, and who incidentally was from a different caste. When told to break off her relationship with him for that reason, she couldn't. Her sister (wife of Naika) and her mother, the latter, both supported their near and dear ones in pursuing their desires. We see nothing wrong with that," the verdict added.

The convict, the verdict said, got his sister-in-law a job due to love and affection for his wife's family members but he couldn't expect that his word would be taken as the gospel truth and everyone was bound to follow it.

"It is sad that such a restrictive world-view on part of the appellant-convict became the reason for these senseless acts of violence and depravity. Had he heeded the advice of PW-2 (wife of Naika), when she told him not to interfere in (sister in-law's) personal matters, he could have gone on to live a perfectly happy life," the bench added.

The verdict went on, "After all, it is not without reason that the well-known proverb goes - 'live and let live' which is said to mean that people should accept the way other people live and behave, particularly, if their way of doing things is different than one's own." According to the prosecution, Naika and his wife were both bank managers posted in Solapur and Mangalore, respectively, and they had two children - a 10-year-old son and three-and-a-half-year old daughter.

On June 16, 2010 he murdered both his sister in-law and mother in-law and dumped their bodies in a septic tank of his house at the ancestral village and then came to Mangalore the next day.

He took his children out on the pretext of showing them around the city in a cab and went to a garden and drowned them in a water tank.

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