A shocked Supreme Court asked whether justice has been sent on ‘vanaprastha’ (retired to the forest) when it found that an acid attacker spent barely 30 days in prison before he walked free in Andhra Pradesh.
A Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and R. Banumathi expressed alarm at how the High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad for the State of Telangana and the State of Andhra Pradesh was guided by “some kind of unfathomable and incomprehensible sense of individual mercy, absolutely ignoring the plight and the pain of the victim; a young girl who had sustained an acid attack” when it released her attacker back into society.
The victim had approached the Supreme Court against the High Court order.
Her assailant had trespassed into her home with an acid bottle and emptied the contents on her head. Her family had previously refused to get her married to him.
‘Complete venom’
In his judgment, Justice Misra said this case projected how a man allows his unrequited love to be converted into “complete venom” which he poured on a hapless girl.
The court ordered the State government to pay the victim a compensation of ₹3 lakh and her attacker to pay ₹50000.
The trial court had not found him guilty of attempting to murder the victim. But he was sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment for causing “grievous hurt by dangerous weapons” and house trespass.
Sentence restored
Restoring the trial judge’s sentence, Justice Misra said the Supreme Court had no hesitation in admitting that the High Court’s decision to reduce the prison sentence of the attacker to the 30 days he had already undergone was a shocking one.
The Supreme Court directed the attacker to be taken back into custody. “The paramount principle that should be the guiding laser beam is that the punishment should be proportionate. It is the answer of law to the social conscience,” the judgment said.
