Gurugram: She was seven years, seven months and 23 days old. Her parents affectionately called her their ‘laadli’ (beloved one). The Punjab and Haryana High Court, in its judgment, chose to call her that too.
On the afternoon of 8 October, 2022, the child slipped out of her house in a village in Kaithal district to play in the alley, as she did most days. She never came back. The next morning, villagers combing a patch of jungle near a local shrine found her half-burnt body, buried partly in loose soil, with wooden sticks scattered around it.
On Monday, a division bench of Justice Anoop Chitkara and Justice Ramesh Chander Dimri upheld the conviction of Pawan alias Moni, a 21-year-old local villager, for raping and murdering the child, but spared him the death sentence the trial court had handed to him.
In its place, the High Court has ordered that Pawan serve a minimum of 50 years in prison without remission for murder, and a further 23 years for rape, running concurrently. This means he will not walk free, if at all, before he turns roughly 73. “How do we save the girls from the perverts who, after committing rape, kill them to destroy the evidence?” the bench asked in its order, before sentencing Pawan to prison “till the sunset of his virility”.
A father’s complaint, a village searches
The child’s father, a labourer with three daughters and a son, filed a missing complaint at Kalayat police station the evening she disappeared. He described her wheatish complexion, her red clothes, red slippers, and her height at three feet. He suspected kidnapping.
By the next day, an SIT had been formed. Local villagers manned the exits so no one could slip out with the child. It was them, not the police, who first spotted her body in a patch of jungle behind a local shrine in the neighbouring village of Kurar.
CCTV footage from a government school, a private house and a petrol pump would go on to place Pawan walking with the child towards the shrine, and returning alone roughly 90 minutes later. He was arrested that same night.
Evidence that convicted him
The trial court’s case leaned heavily on that CCTV footage, on testimony that Pawan was seen buying petrol in a bottle shortly before the child’s body was found half-burnt, and on DNA evidence. A forensic report matched semen recovered from the girl’s clothes to Pawan’s blood sample.
But at the high court, the defence, represented by senior advocate P.S. Sekhon as amicus curiae (friend of the court), found a gap in the prosecution’s case.
The certificates required under Section 65-B of the Indian Evidence Act, which make electronic evidence like CCTV footage admissible in court, had technically not been proved.
The men who ran the CCTV systems denied, under cross-examination, ever signing the certificates credited to them. The High Court agreed. The footage, however damning it looked, could not be treated as legal evidence.
It did not save Pawan.
The judges found that an eyewitness, a relative of the accused, who had no reason to lie for the prosecution, had seen him walking away with the girl towards the school shortly before she vanished. That “last seen” evidence, combined with the unbroken chain of custody on the DNA samples, was enough on its own to convict him, certificate or no.
Why the noose was set aside
Where the case took a more unusual turn was at sentencing.
The State wanted Pawan hanged. Its counsel argued that even if the court chose to spare his life, it must ensure he never walked free, to protect other children from meeting the same fate. The bench agreed with the second half of that argument, not the first.
It noted that a psychological assessment ordered mid-appeal found no psychopathology in Pawan—an average IQ, no cognitive impairment, no psychotic or depressive symptoms.
It also weighed a long line of Supreme Court judgments holding that life imprisonment, not death, is meant to be the rule for murder, and execution the exception reserved for the rarest of rare cases.
Crucially, the bench found that Pawan appeared to have killed the girl in panic, to destroy evidence of the rape, rather than as a premeditated act, a distinction the judges said mattered even in a crime this brutal. “Compulsive retribution by the State, without justifying due process of law, cannot immunise such acts, even when done in the name of the greater public good,” the judgment noted, before commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment on the murder charge, with 50 years to be served in actual custody.
new formula for sentencing child rapists
It is on the rape conviction under the POCSO Act that the judgment takes a new approach.
Indian courts have long lacked clear sentencing guidelines for child sexual assault, and the bench said as much bluntly, admitting it had no fixed doctrine to fall back on.
In its place, the judges devised what they called a “descending scale model”: a sliding formula under which the younger the child, the crueller the act and the more perpetrators involved, the longer the sentence—starting from the legal age of consent and rising sharply as the victim’s age falls.
Applying that scale to this case, the court arrived at 23 years of rigorous imprisonment for the rape, in addition to the 50 years for murder, both running concurrently.
It also raised the fine from the trial court’s token amounts to Rs 50 lakh for the murder and Rs 23 lakh for the rape, to be recovered from Pawan and paid to her parents and siblings as compensation.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)