Six death row convicts on Sunday had their mercy pleas rejected by the President. Among these persons is Surendra Koli, who was found guilty in the sensational Nithari serial rapes and killings.
Besides Koli’s, the President rejected the mercy petitions of sisters Renukabai and Seema (Maharashtra), Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik (Maharashtra), Jagdish (Madhya Pradesh) and Holiram Bordoloi (Assam), following the Home Ministry’s recommendation, official sources said.
The 42-year-old Koli, who killed and later hacked up children in the Nithari locality of Noida in Uttar Pradesh, was awarded death sentence by a lower court which was upheld by the Allahabad High Court and confirmed by the Supreme Court in February 2011.
Koli was found guilty of serial rapes and murders between 2005 and 2006 at the residence of his employer, businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, in Nithari. The remains of several missing children were found near the house.
Koli has been awarded death sentence in four of the 16 cases filed against him and others are still under trial.
The Supreme Court had confirmed the death penalty on Renukabai and Seema in August 2006. The two sisters had, along with their mother and another accomplice Kiran Shinde, kidnapped 13 children between 1990 to 1996 and killed nine of them. However, the prosecution could prove only five murders.
The case against the mother had to be abated after she died in 1997, while Shinde turned an approver in the case.
In January, the Supreme Court had ruled that “inordinate and inexplicable” delays in hanging were grounds for commuting a convict’s death penalty and had spared 15 death row convicts from execution.
In Wasnik’s case, the death sentence was awarded in October 2012 for the sexual abuse and murder of a girl in Maharashtra’s Asra village.
Jagdish was convicted for murdering his wife and five children (four daughters and a son, aged between one and 16 years). He sought that he was of unsound mind and that his death sentence be commuted to life.
Bordoloi’s death sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005. He had carried out the execution of three family members in broad daylight.
