The Hindu : New Delhi News : Plea for capital punishment in Katara case

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Plea for capital punishment in Katara case

Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI: Neelam Katara, mother of deceased Nitish Katara, on Tuesday filed a petition in the Delhi High Court seeking enhancement of sentence from life imprisonment to death for Vikas Yadav and his cousin Vishal Yadav in the Nitish Katara murder case.

Prosecution’s plea

A court here on May 30 had sentenced the two accused to life imprisonment in the case.

The court had dismissed the prosecution’s plea for award of capital punishment to the two, holding that it was not a fit case for death sentence as it was not a “rarest of rare cases”.

Ms. Katara in her petition on Tuesday sought quashing of the lower court order on sentence arguing that it had failed to take into account several vital aggravating circumstances in the case against the two accused while deciding the sentence.

She submitted that the trial court had failed to take into consideration the criminal background of Vikas Yadav, the prime accused in the case, while sentencing him. She said that when he killed her son he was facing prosecution in the Jessica Lal murder case and was on bail. The High Court had later convicted him in the case. Besides, she told the court, he was earlier involved in two murder cases in Uttar Pradesh which the State Government had later withdrawn. Also, the two accused had badly disfigured, mutilated and burnt the body after killing Nitish Katara so that he could not be identified, she argued.

Guidelines

Seeking quashing of the order of sentence by the lower court, Ms. Katara said the case had all the ingredients which met the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court to hold a murder case as a rarest of rare cases. The petition is likely to come up for hearing by the court in a couple of days.

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