SC dismisses review petition of Hoshiarpur boy Abhi’s killers

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 7 

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a review petition filed by Vikram Singh alias Vicky and Jasbir Singh who have been awarded death penalty for kidnapping and killing Abhi Verma alias Harry — a 16-year-old student of Hoshiarpur’s DAV School — in February 2005.

“We, after carefully considering the submissions of the applicants, are of the considered opinion that submissions raised in the review petitions do not raise any ground for review of judgment of this Court dated 25.01.2010,” a three-judge Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra said rejecting the review petition of the convict duo.

The convicts had kidnapped the victim, son of goldsmith Ravi Verma, on February 14, 2005, and then murdered him.

The verdict pushes the convicts closer to the gallows with only curative petition remaining left for them to use as their last legal recourse. In case their curative petition too is dismissed they can file a mercy petition before the President or the Punjab Governor — as the case may be.

BS Billowria and Vijay Pratap Singh said they were likely to file a curative petition after studying the verdict.

The Supreme Court had on January 25, 2010, confirmed the death sentence awarded to the two convicts. But they moved a fresh petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court questioning the validity of Section 364A IPC but the high court dismissed their plea on October 3, 2012, forcing them to approach the SC again.

In August 2015, a three-member Bench headed by Justice TS Thakur (since retired) dismissed their appeal challenging the validity of Section 364A of the Indian Penal Code that provides for death penalty for kidnapping someone for ransom.

It had ruled that the death penalty provided under Section 364A was valid, particularly if the kidnapped person had been murdered. Vicky and Singh were not only held guilty of kidnapping, but also of committing murder, the top court had noted.

 “Sentence of death awarded to them was considered to be just, fair and reasonable even by the standards of rarest-of-rare cases evolved and applied by this court (SC),” the Bench noted.

“It is a case where he was done to death which is what appears to have weighed with the courts in awarding to the appellants the capital punishment. We are not in this round of litigation sitting in judgment over what has already attained finality,” it had pointed out.

The convicts had contended that the death penalty provided under the section violated the right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution, besides being contrary to the principle of “rarest-of-rare cases” laid down by the top court in Bachan Singh’s case for awarding death sentence.