In Brief
Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik was convicted of raping and murdering a 3-year-old girl based on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court, while upholding the conviction, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment without possibility of release, holding that: (1) while death penalty is not prohibited in circumstantial evidence cases, courts must exercise exceptional caution; (2) the prosecution failed to produce available DNA evidence, creating an adverse presumption; (3) courts did not consider the convict's probable capacity for reformation and rehabilitation, a mandatory consideration; and (4) pending criminal trials (as opposed to prior convictions) were wrongly used as an aggravating factor. The judgment reaffirmed that both the crime and the criminal must be weighed equally in sentencing.
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