The High Court of Karnataka has reduced to 10 years the imprisonment imposed on a man, who had raped his 15-year-old stepdaughter, while modifying 20 years of imprisonment imposed by the trial court based on the amended provision of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
As the Article 20(1) of the Constitution of India makes it clear that “no person shall be subjected to a penalty greater than that which might have been inflicted under the law in force at the time of the commission of the offence,” the High Court said that trial court could not have imposed higher sentence, which was not in existence at the time of commission of offence in 2015.
Justice K. Natarajan passed the order while partly allowing an appeal filed by Abdul Khader alias Rafiq, a resident of Bengaluru city. The petitioner had questioned his conviction as well as the sentence.
Repeated assault on minor
The trial court had convicted the petitioner for repeated sexual assault on the 15-year-old victim, who is the daughter of convict’s wife from her first marriage. The offence was registered in October, 2015, and the trial court had convicted him in September, 2019. The trial court had sentenced him to 20 years of imprisonment as per Section 376(3) of the IPC, which came into force in 2018.
Though the High Court upheld the trial court’s order of conviction, it found fault in sentencing him to 20 years as per the 2018 amendment. The HC reduced the sentence as the punishment for raping a minor as per IPC was 10 years at the time of commission of offence in 2015.
The convict, who had four children from the victim’s mother, was indulging in such acts when his wife was staying overnight at her mother’s house in Tumakuru, where she used to go to bring ration. He used to threaten the victim at knife point telling her not to disclose assaults to anyone. After such assaults, the victim, who had gone to her aunt’s house, did not return her stepfather’s house.
The revelation
The victim had revealed the sexual assaults when her mother, aunt and a few relatives decided to search for a groom to perform her marriage and wanted her to go to her stepfather’s house in this regard.
The petitioner had escaped from his house by jumping the compound wall during midnight when his wife and relatives questioned him about assaults, and his wife had later lodged the complaint with the police. While the victim had given her statement before the trial court narrating the assaults, the medical examination too had supported the charge.
