Kerala HC sentences father, stepmother to life imprisonment for murder of minor girl

The Kerala High Court on Thursday sentenced a father and stepmother to life imprisonment for the murder of a six-year-old girl, holding that their “brutal and sustained acts of cruelty” over several months directly caused the girl’s death in 2013.

A division bench of Justices Raja Vijayaraghavan V and K V Jayakumar convicted Subramanian Namboodiri and Ramla Begum alias Devaki Antharjanam under Section 302 read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code, setting aside their 2016 acquittal by a sessions court.

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The high court described the trial court’s earlier reasoning as “manifestly untenable, palpably erroneous, and based on a misapplication of the settled principles of criminal law.”

The bench recorded that the couple’s actions included severe beatings, pouring of boiling water on the child’s genitals, multiple fractures, and deliberate starvation.

The court said that the sessions court judge had misread and ignored overwhelming medical and circumstantial evidence. “The sessions judge has misread and failed to appreciate the credible evidence let in by the prosecution and arrived at a perverse finding, which has resulted in grave failure of justice,” the court said.

It said that the acts of cruelty included severe beatings, the pouring of boiling water on the genitals, multiple fractures and deliberate starvation, and the resulting physical and psychological trauma culminated in the neurogenic shock which led to the girl’s death.

The court further said that the evidence of the victim’s brother — Arun S Namboodiri — and the medical evidence clearly depicted the true extent of the “inhuman, sadistic, and demonic torture to which the young children were subjected”.

Today’s court order gives the message that the brutal and sustained acts of cruelty over a long period inflicted upon a minor child aged six years cannot go unpunished.

As per the case, six-year-old Adithi died in Kozhikode in 2013 after suffering prolonged torture and starvation at the hands of her father and stepmother. She was admitted to a hospital with severe bruises and burn injuries on April 29, 2013, and died the following day.Her post-mortem report revealed the child was subjected to repeated torture and denied food over a prolonged period.

In 2016, sessions court , Kozhikode convicted the couple but acquitted them of the murder charge, sentencing them to three years of rigorous imprisonment for cruelty and grievous hurt.