Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence awarded to Chandrabhan Sanap, convicted for raping and murdering 24-year-old Andhra Pradesh native Esther Anuhya in 2014. Welcoming the HC’s verdict, her father said his faith in the system has been rewarded.
Sanap (33) was arrested in March 2014 by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch for the rape and murder of Esther, who was 24-year-old at the time. Sanap offered to drop her to her hostel on January 4, when she reached Mumbai after spending Christmas and New Year with her family in Machilipattinam. But he instead raped and murdered her at a desolate spot along the Eastern Express Highway. In October 2015, the Sessions Court convicted him and sentenced him to death.
Sanap had subsequently appealed in the HC against the death sentence. On Thursday, a Division Bench of Justices Ranjit More and Bharati Dangre upheld the Sessions Court’s verdict, saying the case falls under the category of ‘rarest of rare’, and ‘amounts to devastation of social trust, shocks the social conscience, and calls for an extreme penalty of capital punishment’.
Speaking to The Hindu on the phone from Machilipattinam, Esther’s father, SJS Prasad, said, “I had heard on Wednesday that the case would be coming up for hearing on Thursday. As soon as I heard the news on Thursday evening, I felt that the faith I had placed in the police and the courts had been rewarded.”
The HC verdict was also welcomed by police officers who investigated the case. Retired Assistant Commissioner of Police Praful Bhosale, under whose leadership the case was investigated, said, “Nothing is more important than the victim’s family getting the justice they deserve. The case was a challenging one but we managed to get strong evidence, both material and circumstantial. The fact that we had eyewitnesses who personally saw Sanap with Esther helped the case a lot.”
Assistant Commissioner of Police Vyankat Patil, who was the police inspector in charge of the Crime Branch Unit VII at the time, said, “Esther was a young girl in a strange city who was subjected to the most inhuman of crimes. The entire team worked hard to ensure that a watertight case be presented in court and the HC upheld the Sessions Court’s sentence based on the evidence that all of us worked tirelessly to gather.”
In a strongly-worded judgement, the HC Bench said Sanap had a history of past crimes, and that there has been no remorse on his part. “Merely because his behaviour as an undertrial prisoner is good and satisfactory, can be no ground to absolve him of the most gruesome and cruel act which he has indulged into. Such a person would surely remain a menace to society. In this backdrop, we are of the firm view that there are no extraneous mitigating circumstances available on record which may justify imposition of sentence less than a death sentence which the learned Sessions Court has imposed,” the HC said.
The Bench also said crimes against women are on the rise, and that the verdict should reflect the public abhorrence that a crime elicits. “Esther was done to death by the accused for no fault of her own, except for a reason that she is a woman, and she fell prey to the sinister design of the accused to fulfil his lust. The attitude of the accused, according to us, deserves a death sentence,” the Bench said.
