STATE OF MAHARASHTRA Vs. NAMDEO LAXMAN GEDAM

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Facts-In Sessions Case No. 135 of 1974, the accused Namdeo Laxman Gedam, stood charged for having committed murder firstly, of his wife by name Shrimati Girjabai @ Girja a lady of twenty-five years, and secondly and thirdly of her two children from her first husband, being Kalpana aged six and Mohan aged four, on May 27, 1974 between 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. in the bed of river Dhorya which is about one Kilometer away from village Temasna in the jurisdiction of the Police Station Mouda, district Nagpur. At the trial the Additional Sessions Judge, Nagpur, found the accused guilty of killing and as such culpable for these three murders. In his view, there being special circumstances, in that the murders were effected in dastardly and cruel manner of defenceless persons involving a woman and her two children, the accused deserved a penalty of death. He, therefore, made a reference being Confirmation Case No. 4 of 1975. Accused Namdeo appealed against his conviction and that was registered as Criminal Appeal No. 177 of 1975.

(2.) Masodkar, J. [Having upheld the conviction of the accused under section 302, Indian Penal Code, which is not material for this Report, while dealing with the sentence, the judgments proceeds.-] Coming to the sentence, we have the reference of the Sessions Judge awarding sentence of death and we feet that the same is well founded.

(2.) We are fully conscious of the call of philosophic and ethical modernity that penalty of death sentence should be removed from statute book and also urging upon the Judiciary to save life rather than extinct it. Piquant question is asked, how the institution of law and the men that man it could assume authority to put off the life or extinguish its flame or to undo the creation that does not owe its origin or birth to it? There is agitated appeal to the principles of life and possibility of reformation and moral uplift of men from the morass of immorality and crime. Epic ethos of such root questions and the bleak tragedy of humanity that surrounds it, is all present to our minds.