The Hindu : Front Page : Two get death for Australian woman’s murder

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Tuesday, Aug 12, 2008
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Two get death for Australian woman’s murder

Staff Reporter

Photo: Sandeep Saxena

A file photo of Jyotish Prasad and Ashish Kumar who have been handed out death sentence in Australian tourist’s murder case.

NEW DELHI: A court here on Monday handed out capital punishment to two taxi drivers for killing 59-year-old Australian tourist Dawn Emilie Griggs after criminally assaulting and robbing her in March 2004.

Pronouncing the judgment, Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Kumar awarded death sentence to Jyotish Prasad and Ashish Kumar, who had been convicted for murder, criminal assault, robbery and destruction of evidence on August 2. The court also imposed a fine of Rs.3,000 on each of the convicts.

“I award death sentence to both the convicts under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code. Both the convicts be hanged till death,” the Judge pronounced inside the packed Patiala House courtroom.

Drawing a parallel with the Dhananjoy Chatterjee’s case in which the Supreme Court had awarded death sentence to the perpetrator of a similar heinous crime in 2004, the court said: “If the facts are seen closely, it would be found that the gravity of the present case is more than the case before the Supreme Court. In our case, the victim was of such an age that she should have been seen by the convicts as a motherly figure. Committing rape of an old lady shows a mind which is more depraved than Dhananjoy Chatterjee’s.”

Dhananjoy was sentenced to death for the criminal assault and murder of a minor girl in Kolkata in 1990.

“In the present case, there is a very high degree of certitude and, therefore, I am unable to restrain myself from awarding maximum punishment,” the Judge said, rejecting the plea of the convicts that they should not be awarded death sentence.

Griggs, who had arrived in the Capital from Australia via Hong Kong, was found murdered with stab injuries and her face smashed in a deserted field near the Indira Gandhi International Airport on March 17, 2004, hours after she took a pre-paid taxi from the airport.

She had come to India to get enrolled in a meditation course.

While convicting the taxi drivers, the Judge had on August 2 said: “All the circumstances have been proved by prosecution and lead to irresistible conclusion that the accused subjected the foreigner to gang-rape and killed her after robbing her of valuables.”

In its 75-page verdict, the court held that the prosecution had conclusively established the complicity of the drivers by linking them with the chain of events.

Investigations by a police team led by Inspector J. L. Meena revealed that Jyotish and Ashish murdered her and tried to decamp with her belongings, but later dumped them at a distance from the scene of crime.

As there was no eyewitness in the case, the prosecution relied on circumstantial and forensic evidence including the DNA reports of the drivers to prove their guilt.

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