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The Supreme Court had to reverse the decision of the High Court which reduced the sentence of imprisonment of the convict to mere four months. The prisoner was convicted for the offence of culpable homicide not amounting murder under section 304 of the Indian Penal Code, even so, he was charged for the offence of murder under section 302 of the IPC. The trial court had sentenced the convict for three-year imprisonment for killing his own father. However, the High Court took certain factors into consideration to reduce the sentence of imprisonment to four months. The first factor was that the convict was charged for the offence of murder but convicted for the offence of culpable homicide, and the second factor was that the convict was 26 years old. Both the factors were not extenuating or aggravating in the opinion of the Supreme Court. Therefore, the Apex Court found the High Court to have erred in its decision. The convict’s act of taking his father to a hospital exhibited his mental element of deception, especially when he said that his father got injured due to a fall.
The High Court said that no useful purpose could be served by detaining the accused in the instant case, and the apex court rejected this observation by citing the need to balance the rights of a wrongdoer against the rights of the society. The Supreme Court said that the deterrence object and the protection of society do not lose their significance with a mere passage of time.
The Supreme Court said that the factor, whether extenuating or aggravating, could not be an exclusive determinant in arriving at a decision. Even as such factors may enjoy some weight, other incidental factors and circumstances should not be ignored by the court of law, especially when such factors concerns the public interest and the society as a whole.
The Apex Court said that the exhibition of leniency by the High Court by drastically reducing the sentence of imprisonment to mere four months was unjustified, thereby restoring the order of the trial court.
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