The Bombay High Court has openly criticized a trial court’s decision to use a verse from the Mahabharata as part of its justification for imposing the death penalty in a multi-murder case. The Division Bench, comprising Justices Vinay Joshi and Abhay Mantri, found the reasoning “strange” and “unwarranted.”
During the review of an appeal by a family convicted of murdering four relatives over a land dispute, the High Court was taken aback by the trial court’s reliance on both ancient scripture and statistical data about murder rates in Maharashtra. The trial court had categorized the case as one of the ‘rarest of rare,’ citing the low frequency of incidents involving four murders in a single event. However, the High Court pointed out the trial court’s failure to focus on the specifics of the case, labeling the approach as “wholly erroneous.”
The Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court made these remarks while deliberating over the case involving the Telgote family, where Haribhau Telgote, his wife Dwarkabai, and their son Shyam were originally sentenced to death by the Sessions Court for the premeditated murders of Dhanraj Charhate and three of his family members over a dispute concerning 29 acres of ancestral land.
The High Court, applying precedents set by the Supreme Court in notable cases such as Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab and Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab, reassessed the punishment. These rulings emphasize that the death penalty should only be applied in instances of extraordinary brutality and where there is no prospect for reform of the convict.
Ultimately, the High Court commuted the death sentences of Haribhau and Shyam Telgote to life imprisonment, acknowledging the severity of the crime but ruling that it did not meet the ‘rarest of rare’ threshold. Dwarkabai Telgote was acquitted, with the court noting a lack of sufficient evidence for her active involvement in the killings.
