SC converts death sentence to life term

New Delhi, Oct 30 (UNI) The Supreme Court has reduced death sentence of two brothers, awarded capital punishment for beheading their brother-in-law, to life imprisonment.

A bench comprising Justices S B Sinha and Markandey Katju in judgment dated October 19 spared the two appellants Major Singh and Baldeo Singh given death sentence for murdering Kashmir Singh on January 24,1999 by severing his head suspecting that Kashmir Singh was responsible for the murder of their sister Sukhvinder Kaur who died after two years of her marriage to the deceased.

The trial court awarded death sentence to the two which was upheld by the Punjab and Haryana high court on July 1, 2005.

Declining to set aside the conviction of the two appellants, the apex court rejected the plea of the convicts that since two of the accused had been acquitted , they were also entitled for acquittal as the prosecution case was not sustainable.

The apex court said," We can not accept the contention of the learned counsel for the appellant that merely because Jagga Singh and Singhara Singh have been acuitted the entire prosecution case has to be rejected. It is well settled that the principle of 'falsus in uno falsus in omnibus' is not an acceptable principle. It is a well known fact that in our country very often the prosecution implicates not only real assailants but also implicates persons so as to spread the net wide. The court can always discriminate and find out that who were the real assailants and who were not." Justice Katju who wrote the 11-page judgment concluded,"However in the facts and circumstances of the case and considering the fact that there was probably some enmity due to suspicion about Sukhvinder Kaur's death two years after her marriage to Kashmir Singh which could have been a motive for the crime, we reduce the sentence awarded to both the accused from death sentence to life sentence under section 302 IPC. This appeal is disposed of accordingly." UNI AKS/SC RP BS1908