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Manoharan v. State by Inspector of Police, Variety Hall Police Station, Coimbatore

Review Petition (Criminal) · 2019 INSC 1216Decided 7 Nov 2019
Review Petition (Criminal) Nos. 446-447 of 2019 in Criminal Appeal Nos. 1174-1175 of 2019
Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman · Justice Surya Kant · Justice Sanjiv Khanna

Background

The petitioner had been convicted for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two young children in Coimbatore, and the Supreme Court (in its original 2019 appellate judgment) had upheld his conviction and, by majority, confirmed the death sentence (with Justice Sanjiv Khanna dissenting on sentence in the original appeal). The petitioner filed review petitions asking the Court to reconsider both the conviction and the death sentence, citing his lack of prior criminal record and his initial confession as grounds for leniency.

Decision Breakdown

The Court (opinion by Surya Kant, J., concurred in by Nariman, J.) held that the crime, the abduction, rape, poisoning, and drowning of two school-going children by persons who had misused the family's trust, was a meticulously planned and executed act that shocked the conscience of the Court and society, meeting the "rarest of the rare" threshold for death sentence. It found the petitioner's attempted retraction of his confession showed a lack of genuine remorse rather than mitigating in his favour, and declined to give weight to his clean prior record given the gravity and multiplicity of offences involved. The review petitions were accordingly dismissed, upholding both conviction and sentence. Justice Sanjiv Khanna, in a separate order, agreed with dismissing the review on conviction, and, despite having dissented on sentence in the original appeal, found no good ground to alter his own prior findings on review either, so he too concurred in dismissing the review petitions.

Lesson Learnt

A review petition is not a fresh appeal: the Supreme Court will only reconsider a final conviction or sentence (including the death penalty) if there is a genuine, substantial ground for review, and factors like an unproven claim of remorse or a clean record will not outweigh the gravity of a meticulously planned, extremely brutal crime.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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