MP HC commutes Datia child rape-murder death sentence to life without remission, citing no adverse jail report
A Gwalior Bench of Justice G.S. Ahluwalia and Justice Anuradha Shukla confirmed the conviction of Chhatrapal Rawat for kidnapping, raping and strangling a nine-year-old girl at a village wedding in May 2022, on the evidence of an 11-year-old cousin who saw him carry the sleeping child away and DNA matches across the clothes of both, but held the case was not rarest of rare because the State produced nothing to show his conduct in jail was abnormal.
A man twice sentenced to death by a Datia trial court for raping and strangling a nine-year-old girl during a village wedding will instead spend the rest of his life in prison with no remission. The Gwalior Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court confirmed his conviction on 28 October 2026 but refused to confirm the death penalty.
Justice G.S. Ahluwalia, writing for himself and Justice Anuradha Shukla, held that the prosecution had proved its circumstantial case against Chhatrapal Rawat beyond reasonable doubt. On sentence, the bench found no State report showing his conduct in jail was abnormal and so declined to place the case in the rarest of rare category.
Sentenced to death twice over
The Special Judge under the POCSO Act, Datia, first convicted Rawat and sentenced him to death on 5 December 2022 in Special Sessions Trial No. 15 of 2022. The trial court sent Criminal Reference No. 10 of 2022 for confirmation and the accused filed Criminal Appeal No. 12641 of 2022.
On 19 June 2026 the High Court set both aside. The investigating officer, Kamal Kishore Goyal (PW-20), had been examined and cross-examined in the absence of the accused, contrary to Section 273 CrPC and Atma Ram v. State of Rajasthan, (2019) 20 SCC 481.
The matter went back to the trial court for his evidence to be re-recorded in the accused’s presence.
The trial court re-recorded PW-20’s evidence, re-examined the accused under Section 313 CrPC, and on 21 July 2026 convicted him again. It awarded death under Sections 376A and 302 IPC and Sections 5(m) and 6 of the POCSO Act, each with a Rs 5,000 fine.
It added three years’ rigorous imprisonment under Section 363 and seven years under Section 366, with no separate sentence under Section 376AB.
That produced Criminal Reference Capital No. 5 of 2026 under Section 366 CrPC, read with Section 407 BNSS, and Criminal Appeal No. 7346 of 2026. The bench reserved judgment on 7 October 2026.
A wedding night, a missing child
On 8 May 2022 the child’s family attended a wedding in a village under Goraghat police station, Datia. At about 1.30 am her mother told her father she could not be found. The parents and an uncle searched the fields, and at about 11 am found her body, naked and drenched in blood.
The family carried the body back to their own village. Police reached the house, where the body lay under a neem tree. Sub-Inspector Vandana Shakya recorded the merg intimation and the father’s dehati nalisi, and the FIR was registered on 9 May 2022 at 11.23 am against an unknown person.
The child’s cousin, referred to as ‘A’ (PW-1) and aged about 11, then gave her account. At around midnight she and the deceased were sleeping on a cot outside while the DJ played.
Rawat, whom she described as her maternal uncle by relation, came and took them into a room where another cot lay, and told her to sleep there. She did not. She slipped out through the back door and went to her mother near the DJ.
When she returned to the cot, she saw Rawat carrying the sleeping child away in his lap. Terrified, she lay down and slept. Only after the body was found did she tell her mother, her aunt and the relatives what she had seen.
Post-mortem: strangulation, rape, a bite mark
A team led by Dr Anil Mangeshkar (PW-7) conducted the post-mortem at 5.10 pm on 9 May 2022. The body measured 131 cm. The team recorded petechial haemorrhages over the face, neck and chest, a patch of abrasions across the front of the neck 11 cm long, extravasation of blood in the neck muscles and a fractured hyoid bone.
The genital findings were of fresh hymenal tears, lacerations of the vaginal walls and urethra, and an anal tear. Two parallel abrasions on the right hand appeared to be a bite mark. There was a deep contusion on the left temporal scalp.
The opinion was death from ante-mortem compression of the neck causing asphyxia, with all injuries ante-mortem and death within one day. In cross-examination Dr Mangeshkar accepted the report did not say how the neck was pressed; the note that the mode of compression was to be investigated, he said, was for the police.
The bench held that the cause of death was homicidal strangulation and that the genital injuries clearly showed the child had been raped.
Arrest, disclosure and the DNA report
On 10 May 2022 the police prepared the spot map and, with a scientific officer, seized blood-stained leaves and wood from the field along with an Aadhaar card in Rawat’s name found in a white envelope. His memorandum under Section 27 was recorded at 10.30 am and he was arrested at 11.15 am.
At 11 am, on his disclosure, the police seized his blue shirt, the child’s blue jeans and her blood-stained pink handkerchief from the other side of a canal. He was medically examined the same day, when his underwear, nail clippings, pubic hair, semen slides and a penile swab were sealed, and a blood sample was drawn.
The child’s clothes, nail clippings, vaginal and anal swabs and viscera had been sealed at the post-mortem and seized at 11 pm on 9 May 2022. Everything reached the State Forensic Science Laboratory, Bhopal, on 11 May 2022, all in sealed condition.
The DNA report dated 29 June 2022 found Rawat’s profile on the child’s jeans, her shirt and her nail clippings. The child’s profile, extracted from her viscera, was found on his shirt and his underwear. The handkerchief carried a mixed profile including hers. His own nail clippings and penile swab yielded uninterpretable low-level profiles.
Charges were framed on 17 June 2022 under Sections 363, 366, 376AB, 376A and 302 IPC and Sections 5(m) and 6 of the POCSO Act. The prosecution examined 20 witnesses; the defence examined none.
Defence: a tutored child and a concocted recovery
Mr R.K. Sharma, Senior Advocate, with Mr Gaurav Samadhiya and Mr Abhijeet Singh Tomar, argued that PW-1 was a created witness whose child testimony had to be taken with a pinch of salt. The father’s dehati nalisi never mentioned that she had seen Rawat take the child, so her account surfaced later.
He attacked the DNA evidence on the ground that the guidelines were not followed and the samples were not kept at minus four degrees, so the profiles could have degraded. The recovery of the jeans and handkerchief was concocted, he said, because the investigating officer had inspected the spot on 9 May and found nothing.
In the alternative, he argued the case was not rarest of rare. The State’s report under Aman Singh v. State of Bihar, decided on 27 April 2026, showed the accused was not a threat to society and his four earlier cases were trivial.
He cited Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik, Raju Jagdish Paswan, Sachin Kumar Singhraha, Sebastian v. State of Kerala and other commutation rulings.
Mr C.P. Singh, Government Advocate, supported the conviction and said the four earlier cases, though trivial, showed the accused’s criminal bent. A man who raped and murdered a nine-year-old was a threat to society and the death sentence should stand.
Safe custody never challenged, recovery upheld
The bench began with Sharad Birdhichand Sarda v. State of Maharashtra, (1984) 4 SCC 116, and its five conditions for a circumstantial case.
It also set out State of M.P. v. Balveer Singh, (2025) 8 SCC 545, on child witnesses: their evidence stands on the same footing as any other once the child is competent, with caution against tutoring but no rule requiring corroboration.
It then found that the child’s clothes, nail clippings and viscera were sealed by the autopsy surgeon before Rawat was in custody, and that no question was put to the investigating officer about their safe custody. The presence of his DNA on her shirt and nail clippings therefore stood unchallenged.
On the recovery, the officer had explained that he did not inspect the spot minutely on 9 May because the body had already been moved. The court found that plausible. It also played the spot videography and saw the jeans and handkerchief lying behind bushes, though it could not gauge the distance from where the body was found.
No suggestion was ever put that Rawat’s blood had been sprinkled on the jeans to fabricate evidence. With the child’s DNA on his shirt and underwear and his on her clothes, the bench held the recovery on his disclosure was not open to doubt.
The cousin who saw him from behind
PW-1 identified Rawat over video conferencing and said she had known him for about a year; he was her aunt’s brother, visited the house and talked to her. In cross-examination she admitted it was dark and that she saw him from behind as he carried the child, but said the height of the person matched his.
The bench rejected the mistaken identity argument for three reasons. She had known him for a year. He had taken her by the hand into a nearby room and instructed her to sleep, giving her a close-range look at him minutes earlier. And she had explained why she could recognise him from behind.
On the darkness, the court relied on Ramesh v. State, (2010) 15 SCC 49: villagers’ eyes are conditioned to low light, and their identification of a known person cannot be rejected for want of fluorescent lighting.
Why the dehati nalisi omission did not matter
The defence had made much of the fact that the father’s report at 11 am did not mention PW-1’s account. The bench read her evidence as a whole.
She said she did not join the search and spoke only after everyone returned with the body. Her father put the time at about 11 am; her mother said about 10 am.
Such minor variations, the court said, mark truthful rather than tutored witnesses, citing Shyamal Ghosh v. State of W.B., (2012) 7 SCC 646, Yogesh Singh v. Mahabeer Singh, (2017) 11 SCC 195, and State of Karnataka v. Suvarnamma, (2015) 1 SCC 323.
Parents who had just recovered their daughter’s semi-naked, injured body could not be expected to keep their calm and hunt for the accused instead of mourning, the bench said. Minute-to-minute details are not expected of natural witnesses. It held that PW-1 must have narrated the incident after the dehati nalisi was lodged, and that her evidence was reliable.
Last seen, ten hours, and a full chain
On the last seen theory the bench drew on Digamber Vaishnav, Nizam, State of U.P. v. Satish, Ashok v. State of Maharashtra and Rajender v. State (NCT of Delhi). Last seen alone does not convict; there must be close proximity to the death and something more connecting the accused to the crime.
Here the child was taken at about midnight and found dead within 10 to 11 hours, and the post-mortem put death within one day. The query report confirmed the neck injuries could be caused by throttling and the genital injuries by sexual assault. That proximity, the court held, was close.
And the case did not rest on last seen alone. The child’s clothes were recovered on the accused’s disclosure, her DNA was on his clothes, and his DNA was in her nail clippings and on her clothes.
The bench held it proved that Rawat, and Rawat only, had raped the child and then strangled her. It confirmed the conviction on every count.
Sentence: Aman Singh, Bhagwani and the jail report
The court then posed “the moot question for consideration is death penalty awarded by the trial Court should be affirmed or not” (para 74). It set out the directions in Aman Singh, under which trial courts must call for reports on aggravating and mitigating circumstances and High Courts must do so at the admission of a death reference.
It quoted Bhagwani v. State of M.P., (2022) 13 SCC 365, where the Supreme Court commuted a death sentence for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old to 30 years without remission because the prosecution had produced nothing to show the convict could not be reformed, and nothing adverse about his jail conduct.
Against that, the bench cited Union of India v. V. Sriharan, (2016) 7 SCC 1, on the need for deterrent punishment and on victimology, and on the settled methodology by which an organised society punishes rather than reacting as a victim’s family would.
The probation officer’s report from Central Jail, Gwalior, dated 6 September 2026, was reproduced in Hindi. It recorded that the convict, aged about 32, came from a poor farming family in Shivpuri district, had studied to Class 5 and was divorced after the offence.
He prayed daily, had earned no jail punishment and was disciplined and cooperative. The report described his jail conduct as satisfactory and reformative.
Not rarest of rare, but no remission
The bench noted the four earlier cases, trivial in nature but indicative of the accused’s mental status. It recorded that the maximum sentence under Section 376A IPC and Section 6 of the POCSO Act is life for the remainder of natural life, and that only constitutional courts can award such a sentence without remission.
The crime, it said, was committed not by a stranger but by a maternal uncle by relation whose duty was to protect the child. He had first tried to take PW-1 and, when she ran, carried off the sleeping victim instead. In the bench’s words, “the sanctity of relationship has been murdered” (para 79).
Weighing proportionality, the court held the case did not fall within the rarest of rare category because there was no report by the State to show that the appellant’s conduct in jail was not normal. The death sentence deserved interference, it said, “because death sentence is an exception rather than rule” (para 80).
Considering the totality of the facts, the bench held that life imprisonment for the remainder of life without any remission would serve the deterrent policy of sentencing.
Order
The death sentence under Sections 376A and 302 IPC and Sections 5(m) and 6 of the POCSO Act was converted to imprisonment for the remainder of the convict’s natural life without any remission. The remaining sentences were affirmed. The trial court’s judgment of 21 July 2026 was otherwise affirmed and the reference and appeal disposed of.
Rawat remains in jail and will serve the sentence as modified. A copy of the judgment and the trial record were ordered to be sent back to the trial court immediately for compliance. The judgment was pronounced on 28 October 2026.