President Droupadi Murmu has rejected the mercy petition of a man convicted for raping and stoning to death a four-year-old girl in Maharashtra in 2008, according to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The Supreme Court had on May 3, 2017, dismissed the review petition of Vasanta Sampat Dupare (then 55 years old) and sent him to the gallows. The President's secretariat had on March 28 this year received a recommendation from Union Home Ministry in the matter. "The mercy petition was rejected by the President (on April 10)," said a statement on the status of the mercy petition, updated as on April 28, 2023, by the President's secretariat.
The apex court had in 2017 held that "the aggravating circumstances and the barbaric manner in which the four-year-old was killed, clearly outweigh the mitigating circumstances". It had on November 26, 2014, upheld the trial court's as well as the Bombay High Court's decision of awarding death sentence to Maharashtra resident Dupare in the 2008 rape and murder case. The top court had on July 14, 2016, agreed to examine the plea of Dupare, who had claimed he was not accorded a fair chance to put forth his arguments in the trial court which sentenced him to death.
While upholding the death penalty awarded to the convict, the top court had said that the rape of a minor girl was "a monstrous burial of her dignity in darkness." The court had referred to the sequence of events in the case and said that the convict, who was a neighbour, lured the girl, raped her and then battered her to death using two heavy stones.
