Gurugram: She was all of seven years old. The Punjab and Haryana High Court “affectionately” called her Laadli, or loved one, as it upheld the conviction of the man who raped and killed her in May 2021, sparing him the noose but pronouncing imprisonment for half a century with no chance of early release or remission.
Hearing a death reference alongside the convict’s appeal, Justices Anoop Chitkara and Ramesh Chander Dimri on Monday converted the death sentence awarded to convict Anand Singh by a trial court into life imprisonment—with a rider that he cannot be released before serving 50 actual years behind bars.
Laadli’s father, a tribal labourer from Madhya Pradesh working at a tile plant in Palwal, left for work on 24 May 2021, leaving his children behind. By afternoon, she was missing, and he searched on his own before finally going to the police.
The next morning, a second complaint named a neighbour, Anand Singh, then 27, who had not gone to work that day. Singh was arrested and allegedly led police to a pit in a nearby field, where Laadli’s body was found, tied by the neck to a tree with her own kurta, her clothes stained with blood.
The post-mortem examination found she had been raped, and died of asphyxiation caused by strangulation. A local shopkeeper testified that he had seen Singh buy biscuits for the girl on the morning she disappeared, the last time she was seen alive.
The trial court convicted Singh in 2023 for kidnapping, rape and murder, and rape under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012, sentencing him to death. The case reached the high court both as a reference for confirmation of that death sentence and as Singh’s own appeal against conviction.
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Where the police stumbled
The judgment does not go easy on the investigation. The bench found that a key piece of evidence, Anand Singh’s disclosure statement, said to have led the police to the body, could not be trusted. Multiple witnesses put the discovery of the body and the arrival of forensic teams well before the time police say Singh was even arrested.
The statement itself was a typed document, and the court asked a pointed question: where did the police get a laptop and printer in a forest clearing? The bench concluded the statement had likely been fabricated after the body was found, and refused to rely on it.
The court also flagged that the victim’s parents were never shown her clothes in the witness box to confirm they were hers, and raised questions about the delay in sending the First Information Report (FIR) to a magistrate. None of this, the judges said, was the fault of the investigating officers so much as the public prosecutor and the trial judges who let the gaps go unnoticed.
What still held up
Despite the holes, the bench found the core of the prosecution case intact. The shopkeeper’s testimony placed Anand Singh with the girl shortly before she vanished. DNA evidence proved decisive; semen recovered from the girl’s clothes matched Singh’s, with the chain of custody found to be unbroken across every forensic laboratory that handled the exhibits. Between the last-seen evidence and DNA match, the court held, the guilt of Anand Singh was established beyond reasonable doubt.
On sentencing, the bench turned to years of Supreme Court precedents holding that death is the exception, not the rule, even in child rape-murder cases. It surveyed roughly two dozen judgments where the country’s top court had commuted death sentences for similar crimes, often replacing them with a fixed term of 25 to 30 years without remission.
The judges devised what they called a “descending scale” for the first time in this kind of case: the younger the victim, the longer the sentence should be, working backward from the age of consent. Given Laadli was just short of seven, the court settled on 23 years of rigorous imprisonment for the POCSO offence, and life imprisonment, with a floor of 50 years actually served, for the murder.
The fine imposed on Singh was also sharply increased, from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50 lakh for the murder conviction and Rs 23 lakh for the rape conviction, to be paid as compensation to Laadli’s family after adjustment against compensation already released by the state.
Uneasy judgment
Even while commuting the sentence, the bench seemed uneasy with its own conclusion. It wrote that once rape of a child is established, the punishment for it is no less grave than murder, and that the real tragedy was not the assault alone but that Laadli did not survive to name her attacker. The judges said they were making a “conscious decision” to signal that her murder, not her rape, was the truly irreversible act, because had Singh not strangled her, she may have yet lived.
The court’s final order said Anand Singh’s conviction stands on all counts. His death sentence for murder was commuted to life imprisonment, with a minimum actual sentence of 50 years before he can be considered for release. His death sentence under the POCSO Act was commuted to 23 years’ rigorous imprisonment. Both sentences are to run concurrently, and the murder reference placed before the high court for confirming the original death sentence was dismissed.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)