Supreme Court upholds death to 2 killers of Hoshiarpur boy

R Sedhuraman

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, August 22

The Supreme Court has reaffirmed the death sentence awarded to Vikram Singh, alias Vicky, and Jasbir Singh for the kidnap and murder of Abhi Verma, alias Harry, a student of Hoshiarpur’s DAV School, in February 2005.

A three-member Bench headed by Justice TS Thakur delivered the judgment while dismissing the appeal filed by them, challenging the validity of Section 364A of the Indian Penal Code that provides for death penalty for the crime of kidnapping someone for ransom. The Bench, which included Justices RK Agrawal and Adarsh Kumar Goel, 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 apex court noted.

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

“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 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 SC in the Bachan Singh case for awarding capital punishment.

On January 25, 2010, an apex court Bench had confirmed the death sentence awarded to the two convicts.

They then went back to the Punjab and Haryana Court and filed a writ petition seeking relief by questioning 364A and citing the Bachan Singh case, but the HC dismissed their plea on October 3, 2012, forcing them to approach the SC again. The SC noted that the two had been sentenced to death both under Section 364A and 302 (murder) and as such getting relief under 364A would not be of much help to them.