New Delhi, September 3
Citing extreme poverty and other mitigating circumstances, the Supreme Court has commuted the death sentence awarded to 35-year-old Sushil Kumar, a Jalandhar resident, for murdering his wife and two minor children on March 4, 2005 to life imprisonment.
Beginning its 22-page judgment with the remark "life or death is the question involved in this appeal," a bench comprising Justices VS Sirpurkar and Deepak Verma pointed out the convict had been unemployed for 7-8 months before committing the crime.
Among the other reasons given by the judges for commuting the death penalty were that Kumar's family was existing on borrowed money and he himself had consumed sulphas tablets to commit suicide, besides giving it to his family members, in a bid to escape poverty.
"In any case he cannot be a threat to the society and there are fairly good chances of his reformation as he has learnt sufficient lessons from it. Extreme poverty had driven the appellant to commit the gruesome murder of three of his very near and dear family members - his wife, minor son and daughter."
“Also, there was nothing on record to show that the convict was a habitual offender. He appears to be a peace loving, law abiding citizen but, as he was poverty stricken, he thought in his wisdom to completely eliminate his family so that all problems would come to an end….there appears to be fairly good chances of the appellant being reformed and becoming a good citizen," the apex court said.
Modifying the death sentence awarded by the trial judge and confirmed by the Punjab & Haryana High Court, the Supreme Court said in its verdict delivered on September 1 that it was of the opinion that the case was not one that fell in the category of the rarest of rare cases.
