The Supreme Court has directed the Bombay high court to decide afresh on the death sentence of a dentist, whose life sentence was turned into capital punishment by the latter in the 1994 sensational double murder of a man and a woman in two different hotels.
A bench of justices comprising K.S. Radhakrishnan and Dipak Misra, in a judgment pronounced on Tuesday, but made available on Wednesday, maintained Dr Ajay Pandit alias Jagdish Dayabhai Patel’s conviction. However, they 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 “elicited relevant” facts from the accused, which had maintained “total silence” about the circumstances of the case and it required further extraction of facts as he was awarded death sentence.
“The HC committed a gross error of procedure in not properly assimilating and understanding the purpose and object behind Section 235(2) CrPC”, the top court said.
Dr Patel’s case had hit headlines for the modus operandi adopted by him to trap people on the pretext of sending them to the US, claiming that he had high contacts in the US Embassy.
Both the victims who died due to the administering poisonous drugs were from Gujarat and were identified as Nilesh and Jayashree. Jayshree’s husband Kaush-ikbhai Sanabhaiu Patel, however, had survived.