In a majority judgment of 2:1, a bench headed by Justice RF Narimansaid there are no grounds to review convict Manoharan’s death penalty as he has committed a grave offence.
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a petition filed by a death row convict seeking review of its verdict and upheld his conviction and death sentence for “horribly” gang-raping a minor girl and later killing her along with her brother in Coimbatore in 2010.
In a majority judgment of 2:1, a bench headed by Justice RF Nariman said there are no grounds to review convict Manoharan’s death penalty as he has committed a “grave offence to the society”.
While Justices Nariman and Suryakant dismissed the review plea, Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who was also part of the three-judge bench, stuck to his earlier view of life sentence.
“In view of the majority judgment, the review petition stands dismissed in its entirety,” the bench said.
The Supreme Court had last month stayed the execution of convict Manoharan when the convict approached top court to review the death penalty.
The top court had on August 1 sent Manoharan to jail for “horribly” gang-raping a 10-year-old girl along with a co-accused and killing her and her seven-year-old brother by throwing them in a canal with their hands tied.
Terming the offence as “shocking” and “cold-blooded”, a three-judge bench, by a majority of 2:1, upheld the verdicts of the trial court and the Madras High Court to award death penalty to the convict saying that the offence fell under the “rarest of rare” category.
Manoharan and co-accused Mohanakrishnan, who was later shot dead in an encounter, had picked up the minor girl and her younger brother from outside a temple on October 29, 2010 when they were going to school.
They had tied the hands of both minor siblings and brutally gang-raped the girl before trying to kill them by poisoning.
As they did not die of poisoning, the two men tied their hands and threw them to Parambikulam-Axhiyar Project canal where they drowned.
With inputs from agencies
