In Brief
A 27-year-old man was convicted of kidnapping, sexually abusing, and murdering a seven-year-old girl in 2011, based on circumstantial evidence. The trial court and High Court awarded death sentence. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction but found the case did not meet the 'rarest of rare' threshold for capital punishment. Following established precedent that the Court can substitute death with life imprisonment under Article 142, the Court commuted the sentence to life imprisonment with the mandatory direction that the appellant cannot be released before completing actual 25 years of imprisonment, balancing society's interests against outright capital punishment."
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