Pune: Over seven years after a trial court in Mumbai sentenced the three men, including an 18-year-old, to death by hanging, the Bombay High Court today upheld the conviction and commuted them to life sentence.
A 22-year-old photo-journalist had complained of gang-rape in August 2013, at the defunct mill compound by five persons, including a minor.
In March 2014, a sessions court in Mumbai held five persons guilty in the 2013 case, which had caused a national outrage. One of them, Siraj Khan, was sentenced to life imprisonment, while a second accused, a minor, was sent to a correctional facility.
Jadhav, Bengali, and Ansari were sentenced to death under the then newly introduced section 376 (E) of the IPC since the three had also been convicted in a previous case of gang-rape. The three, however, moved the HC soon after their conviction, challenging the constitutional validity of the law under which they were sentenced to death for a repeat offence.
The convicts, Vijay Jadhav, Kasim Bengali and Salim Ansari, represented by senior counsel Yug Chaudhry, had argued that the death sentence awarded to them was wrong in law.
