The Supreme Court has directed the Bombay high court to decide afresh the issue of death sentence of a dentist whose life sentence was converted by it into capital punishment in the 1994 sensational double-murder of a man and a woman in two different hotels.
A bench of Justices K.S. Radhakrishnan and Dipak Misra, in a judgement pronounced on Tuesday but made available on Wednesday, though maintained Dr Ajay Pandit’s, alias Jagdish Dayabhai Patel, conviction but said since the HC had converted his life sentence into death penalty, it had not “fulfilled” certain legal requirements to address the issue.
The basic lacuna found in the HC’s verdict on sentence was that it had not “elicit relevant” facts from the accused, who had maintained “total silence” about the circumstances of the case. In such a situation, HC was bound to extract those facts from other source after all it was dealing with the question of death sentence, which is only given in the “rarest of rare” circumstances.
“In the instant case, the HC has not addressed the issue in the correct perspective bearing in mind those relevant factors, while questioning the accused and, therefore, committed a gross error of procedure in not properly assimilating and understanding the purpose and object behind Section 235(2) CrPC” under which the relevant facts have to be extracted from the accused when the punishment of death is considered, the top court said.
The murders committed by Dr Patel in 1994 had hit the headlines for several days for the modus operandi adopted by him to trap people in his net on the promise of sending them to US.