The High Court confirms every finding of guilt, then refuses to confirm the death sentence
A neighbour took a two-year-old from the street and buried her. The trial court sentenced her to hang. The Division Bench has upheld the conviction on the whole chain of circumstances and substituted thirty years without remission.
When a Sessions Judge passes a death sentence it does not take effect until a High Court confirms it. The case goes up as a reference whether or not the convict appeals, and the High Court reconsiders the whole matter — the evidence as much as the sentence.
On 23 September 2026 a Division Bench of Justice Vinod S. Bhardwaj and Justice Ravinder Malik decided two such matters together: the murder reference sent by the District and Sessions Judge, Ludhiana in Sessions Case No. 26 of 2022, and the appeal filed by the convict against both conviction and sentence. The Bench upheld the conviction in full. It declined to confirm the death sentence, and commuted it to rigorous imprisonment for thirty years without remission.
Five minutes
The FIR was registered on the statement of the child’s grandfather on 28 November 2021 at Police Station Shimlapuri, Ludhiana, under Sections 364, 302 and 201 of the Indian Penal Code. The judgment anonymises the family throughout.
His account was this. He works in a factory. His elder son is in the Punjab Police and has two children — a boy of about six and a half, and a girl of two years and nine months. That afternoon his wife was in the street with her granddaughter. At about 2.15 p.m. she went inside to drink water, leaving the child playing. She was gone about five minutes. When she came back the child was not there.
The family began searching. In the course of that search they came to learn that a neighbour, Neelam, had taken the child away. The motive the grandfather offered was that his son had stopped the child’s mother from speaking to Neelam, who was regarded in the neighbourhood as a woman of bad character.
The FIR was first registered for the offence of kidnapping. It became a murder case the same day. During investigation one Gurpreet Singh came to the police and said that Neelam had met him outside his house and told him she had buried the child in a pit. On that extra-judicial confession she was arrested at about 11.30 that night. The body was recovered from a plot, exhumed from the spot where the child had last been seen in her company.
The trial court convicted her on 12 April 2024 and sentenced her on 18 April. For murder it directed that she be hanged by the neck until dead, subject to confirmation by the High Court, with a fine of Rs 50,000 payable in the event the death sentence was not confirmed. For kidnapping in order to murder it imposed life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10,000; for causing disappearance of evidence, seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 2,000.
A case with no eyewitness, and a camera trail
Nobody saw the child die. The prosecution case rested on circumstantial evidence, and the defence attacked it on exactly that footing — that in a circumstantial case the chain must be complete, and here it was not.
What made the chain hard to break was a route captured on camera. A neighbour, Avtar Singh, had four CCTV cameras at his home and handed the footage to the police, proving it with a certificate under Section 65-B of the Evidence Act. On a request to the Police Control Room, an Assistant Sub-Inspector in charge of the Safe City Project retrieved the footage along the route from the Shimlapuri police station area to the Jalandhar Bypass, where the body was later recovered, and proved that with a Section 65-B certificate of his own.
That footage showed a black Activa scooter, its registration number identified, carrying the accused and the child. Photographs were developed from the recordings, and the Bench records that the faces are clearly visible in both. A shopkeeper deposed to seeing the accused with the child near the Jalandhar Bypass that day. Call detail records, exhibited separately, placed her along the same route at the relevant time.
The detail that does the work is what the cameras showed on the way back. Travelling out from Shimlapuri towards the Jalandhar Bypass she was seen with the child. Returning, she was seen alone.
Twenty-odd witnesses were examined. Besides the grandfather, the grandmother and the mother deposed; a draftsman prepared the scaled site plan; a Sub-Inspector of the police control room took the child out of the pit and carried her to hospital; a data entry operator from the Regional Transport Authority proved the ownership of the scooter; and two witnesses from a private security firm established that the last seen witness was posted as a guard at the plot in question. Dr. Gurbinder Kaur conducted the postmortem. The cause of death was asphyxia from choking on a foreign body, sufficient in the ordinary course to cause death. There was no mark of injury on the body.
The defence arguments ran through every link. The last seen witness deposed to seeing the accused with a child at about 2.50 p.m., but he had been sitting in a security cabin some twenty-five feet from the road and about a hundred feet from the spot, and the gap between the sighting and the recovery was said to be too wide for his evidence to stand. There was no reason, counsel argued, for the accused to volunteer an extra-judicial confession to a man who held no position of authority or confidence. The recovery preceded her formal nomination as an accused. Timings were not consistently recorded. The electronic evidence was challenged on the footing that the persons producing it were not established to have been in lawful control of the cameras, and that footage from the police station itself was not preserved in the DVR.
One argument went to physical possibility. The accused was unarmed; the pit was two to three feet deep; no digging implement was found at the place by the security guard, the Sub-Inspector who recovered the body or the ASI who reached the spot; and the prosecution case was that she had dug it with bare hands. A single woman, it was said, could not have buried a child in so short a time, and the narrative did not inspire confidence.
Mr. Mohit Kapoor, Senior Deputy Advocate General, Punjab appeared for the State. Mr. A.D.S. Sukhija, Senior Advocate, assisted the Court as amicus curiae.
The footage, and what the accused did not say about it
The State met the electronic-evidence objection on two levels. The first was factual. Both the neighbour and the Safe City officer described how the footage was transferred and handed to the police, identified the device on which it had been stored, and identified the accused herself when the recording was played in court. The chain, on that evidence, was complete.
The second was the accused’s own response. When the footage was played in court and she was examined under Section 313 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and asked to explain it, she disputed neither her identity nor the recording.
On the form of the certificates, the State urged a pragmatic reading. Section 65-B prescribes no statutory form, and the people who issue such certificates are not lawyers; they cannot be expected to navigate technicalities, and the generality of the language they use should not be dissected microscopically to defeat admissibility. The certificate of the neighbour, set out in the judgment, says simply that four CCTV cameras at his residence record the view in several directions outside his house, that the DVR holds about fifteen days of recording, and what that recording showed on the afternoon in question from about 2.15 p.m.
That time is the same one the grandmother gave: 2.15 p.m. was when she went indoors for water. The camera in a neighbour’s wall began recording the answer to her five missing minutes before the family knew there was anything to look for.
Section 106, and the silence that counted
The Bench answered the circumstantial-evidence argument through Section 106 of the Evidence Act, which provides that when a fact is especially within the knowledge of a person, the burden of proving that fact lies upon him.
It set out the settled limits of that provision before applying it. In Ram Gopal v. State of M.P. the Supreme Court held that once the prosecution establishes that the accused was last seen with the deceased, the accused is expected to explain when and in what circumstances they parted company. The burden of proving guilt always remains on the prosecution, and Section 106 is not intended to relieve it of that duty — but where an accused throws no light on facts proved to be within her special knowledge, that failure may supply an additional link in the chain. In a case built on circumstantial evidence, whether or not an explanation is furnished becomes a crucial fact once the last seen theory is proved.
The Bench also cited Dinesh Kumar v. State of Haryana, where the Court described Section 106 as an exception to Section 101 which comes into play only in a limited sense — it does not alter the position that the prosecution must prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, and merely places a burden of disclosure once certain circumstances are established.
Those circumstances were established here. The body was recovered from the same spot where the child was last seen in the accused’s company, which the Bench described as another clinching circumstance.
Each objection, answered
On motive, the Bench drew a distinction that matters in circumstantial cases. The grandfather gave his reasons for believing the accused bore a grudge against the family, but the trigger for what she did would be known only to her. One person may believe a particular reason to exist in another’s mind while the actual reason is different, and that mismatch does not dislodge the prosecution case. In cases of circumstantial evidence motive may vary from person to person, unlike direct-injury cases where motive often surfaces as the trigger. The witnesses gave their grounds of suspicion, and their statements were to be read as nothing more than that.
On the extra-judicial confession, the Bench held that the question of why the accused would confess to that particular person need not be gone into, given the weight of the other evidence proved on record — it would have no bearing on the merits.
On the missing timings, it held the objection consequential, because other material evidence corroborated both the timings and the accused’s presence in and around the place of occurrence at those hours.
The reliance placed on Vishwajeet Kerba Masalkar v. State of Maharashtra (2024 INSC 788) was held misplaced on the facts, and the other authorities urged to the same effect were not separately dealt with for the same reason.
Reading the evidence as a whole, the Bench held the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt and that the chain of circumstances was complete. The conviction stood.
The hiatus between fourteen years and death
That left the sentence, and here the judgment turns to the line of Supreme Court authority which created a middle option in capital cases.
The passage the Bench relies on identifies the danger in a binary choice. Where a court’s options are limited to a sentence of imprisonment which in practice means not more than fourteen years, and death, it may feel tempted — nudged, in the language quoted — into endorsing the death penalty, because fourteen years would amount to no punishment at all for the crime before it. That course, the Supreme Court said, would be disastrous. The proper approach is to expand the options and take over what lawfully belongs to the court: the vast hiatus between fourteen years’ imprisonment and death.
Applying that, the Bench held that although the offence is gruesome, this was not a case in which capital punishment was the only punishment that could be imposed. It could not hold that the accused is beyond reform or a threat to society at large. She has children of her own. She had exhibited no disorderly or disruptive behaviour, maintained cordial relations with fellow inmates, and had not indulged in indiscipline of any nature.
The judgment then asks whether capital punishment is the beginning of a sentence or the end of it, and answers that a sentence which affords time for introspection and daily repentance is a sentence served — the past serving as a reminder each morning to make good for the wrong done. A mother has lost her daughter; the Bench declined to let the children of the accused lose their mother to a point of no return, observing that a society is built not by denying children what their mother stole but by ushering in some hope.
The order
The death sentence under Section 302 IPC was commuted to rigorous imprisonment for thirty years without remissions, with a fine of Rs 50,000 and, in default of payment, one year’s rigorous imprisonment.
The sentences for the offences under Sections 364 and 201 IPC were maintained, with fines. All sentences are to run concurrently.
The judgment records that it is speaking and reasoned, and that it is not reportable — a registry classification that governs law reporting, not the public significance of a High Court declining to send a woman to the gallows for the murder of a child.