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Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi on Friday headed a Special Bench of the Supreme Court and stayed the execution of death penalty against a school teacher for raping a 4 year-old girl in June last year in Satna district of Madhya Pradesh. The bench, which also included Justices L Nageswar Rao and Sanjiv Khanna stayed the death sentence issued by a Satna court on February 4 against Mahendra Singh Gond. The death penalty was scheduled to be carried out on March 2 in Jabalpur prison.
The girl was so brutally assaulted that she had to spend months in AIIMS-Delhi to realign her intestines. After raping her, the rapist had thrown her into a jungle thinking she was not alive. Her family members discovered her in the wee hour, at that time she was barely found alive. The state government intervened immediately and airlifted her to Delhi.
On January 25, the Madhya Pradesh High Court confirmed the death warrant awarded to Gond by the trial court. The trial court had convicted the school teacher on September 19, 2018 and had sentenced Gond to death under the newly-introduced Indian Penal Code (IPC) Section 376(a)(b) (raping a minor under 12 years of age).
This was probably the first case in which a High Court has upheld a death sentence under Section 376(AB) of the Indian Penal Code, which lays down provisions for the death penalty for rapists of girls under 12 years of age. This provision was introduced in the IPC last year, through the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2018.
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