Man gets death penalty for rape, murder of 7-year-old

TNN Jun 3, 2012

NEW DELHI: A trial court has sentenced a person to death for raping a seven-year-old girl before killing her, as it stressed the need for courts to have zero tolerance for crimes against children.

Additional sessions judge (ASJ) Kamini Lau handed out the death penalty to Sanjay Kumar Valmiki, a resident of Haiderpur in north Delhi, saying there was only one sentence for a person convicted of raping and killing a child. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 1,61,000 on the convict stipulating that, if recovered, Rs 1 lakh should be given as compensation to the victim's family.

Valmiki had raped and murdered the minor last year at the NDPL office in the capital when the girl had gone there in search of water. The matter came to light when the victim's decomposed body was found from the NDPL office's switch gear room after two days.

The court said there was a public outcry after the incident, and that if Valmiki had fallen into the hands of the mob, he would have been lynched. "This court cannot ignore the loud cry for justice by society in this case involving a heinous crime of rape on an innocent child and her grotesque killing, and will respond by imposition of proper sentence lest people loose faith in the judicial system and take law into their hands," the judge said.

While expressing anguish over such heinous crime, Lau said a message should be sent to society that the judicial system in the country has "zero tolerance" for those "who mess with children" and "a single moment of madness can lead them to gallows".

"In a country of Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, governed by faith believing in sacredness of all living creatures, urging the avoidance of harm and violence and practicing ahimsa, the convict without a moment of remorse and regret even for once murdered the child and it is hence that the case falls in the category of rarest of rare cases," the judge said.

The court said the convict committed an unthinkable act of ravaging the child's body, which even an animal won't do. "The injures on the body of the child, as many as 15 in number, speak volumes of the brutality and force with which the innocent child had been battered to death," Lau said.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-06-03/delhi/32005688_1_death-penalty-valmiki-convict