In Brief
The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a 25-year-old man for abducting, raping, and murdering his 4-year-old niece. The Court held that failure to prove a DNA test does not invalidate a prosecution case if other credible evidence establishes guilt. Circumstantial evidence—including the accused's extrajudicial confession, recovery of the body on his disclosure, and post-mortem findings of rape and strangulation—sufficed to prove the charges. However, the Court commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, finding that the accused's youth, capacity for rehabilitation, and low likelihood of re-offending were compelling mitigating factors that precluded the death penalty as not being a 'rarest of the rare' case.
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