The bench, consisting of Justices Abhay S. Oka, Ahsanuddin Amanullah, and Augustine George Masih, dismissed the Maharashtra government’s appeal against the High Court ruling.
NEW DELHI: On December 9, 2024, the Supreme Court upheld the Bombay High Court’s decision to commute the death sentences of two convicts in the 2007 Pune BPO employee gang-rape and murder case to life imprisonment for 35 years due to the excessive delay in their execution.
The bench, consisting of Justices Abhay S. Oka, Ahsanuddin Amanullah, and Augustine George Masih, dismissed the Maharashtra government’s appeal against the High Court ruling.
Convicts Purushottam Borate and Pradeep Kokade were originally scheduled for execution on June 24, 2019, but the Bombay High Court had intervened on June 21, 2019, preventing the execution until further notice. On July 29, 2019, the High Court granted a stay on their death sentence, citing undue delays in the execution process.
The High Court criticized the delay, attributing it to a lack of urgency in processing their mercy petitions and the final execution order by both the state and central governments. The Court emphasized that the prolonged delay violated the convicts’ fundamental rights under Article 21 of the Constitution (Right to Life and Personal Liberty), as the responsibility for executing the sentence lay with the state government. Merely requesting a date from the sessions court was deemed insufficient compliance with the execution procedure.
The High Court stated, “The delay in carrying out the death penalty in this case was excessive, unjustifiable, and unreasonable.” It also noted that the delay could have been avoided had the mercy petitions and the final execution been handled with greater urgency. “There has been undue and unexplained delay by both the state and central governments in processing the mercy petitions,” the Court observed.
The Court emphasized, “In this case, where the execution of two convicts is at stake, it is essential to consider that when Article 21 of the Indian Constitution (Right to Life and Personal Liberty) is involved, all branches of the state—whether the Executive, the Judiciary, or the Governor and President—are equal in responsibility.”
The Court added that any delay by the state or central government infringes upon the convicts’ fundamental rights.
“It is evident that the state government bears the responsibility for executing the death penalty. The state must set a date and obtain a death warrant,” the judgment clarified. Simply writing letters to the sessions court requesting a date for execution does not fulfill the necessary compliance, it stated.
“In this situation, we have decided to commute the death penalty to a life term of 35 years, taking into account the time the petitioners have already spent in prison,”
the High Court concluded.
Given the prolonged wait and the time already spent by the convicts in prison, the High Court commuted their death sentence to life imprisonment for a term of 35 years.
Background
The case dates back to November 1, 2007, when a 22-year-old Wipro BPO employee was abducted, raped, and murdered by cab driver Borate and his accomplice Kokade. The victim, traveling to her night shift in Pune, was taken to a remote area, where she was assaulted and killed. The convicts were sentenced to death by the sessions court in 2012, a decision upheld by the High Court and Supreme Court in subsequent years.
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