A view of Supreme Court advanced. File
| Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
A 3-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Monday remitted the 20-year sentence of a person discovered responsible of the aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old lady whom he later married and had youngsters with in Tamil Nadu.
The Special Bench, additionally comprising the 2 senior most puisne judges, Justices Sanjiv Khanna and B.R. Gavai, handed the order below the extraordinary powers of the Supreme Court to do ‘complete justice’ endowed to the highest court docket by Article 142 of the Constitution.
The order got here in a healing petition, a uncommon treatment, filed by the convict, Sankar, within the Supreme Court.
He had argued that “with his incarceration, his marital life with the prosecutrix (the assault victim who is his wife now) has been shattered, leaving the prosecutrix and her children destitute”.
The man was convicted and sentenced to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment below Section 6 (aggravated sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in 2018. His sentence was confirmed by the Madras High Court in 2021. His attraction and subsequently, a petition to overview the judgment, had been rejected by the Supreme Court. This had led to the submitting of the healing plea.
In it, the person mentioned he and the prosecutrix had been married for a few years and have two youngsters.
The counsel for the convict mentioned the person was the uncle of the sufferer.
The Bench, contemplating the “peculiar facts” of the case, remitted the remaining jail sentence of the person. The court docket ordered the person to be launched, and the tremendous of ₹2 lakh imposed on him to be waived.
The court docket referred to 2 of its earlier judgments, together with Ok. Dandapani, wherein the Supreme Court had refused to “disturb” the “marriage” and “happy family life” of a person convicted of raping his minor niece, who later grew to become his spouse.
In this case, the customized of avunculate marriage between maternal uncles and nieces in Tamil Nadu had triumphed over the strict provisions of the POCSO Act.
Source: www.thehindu.com
