The Madras High Court has disapproved of the stand taken by the State government, which ordered premature release of a man convicted for smothering his three-day-old baby girl to death in Salem in 1992, but denied the same relief to his wife, who was the co-accused in the crime and had also been sentenced to life imprisonment along with him.
A Bench of Justices P.N. Prakash and R. Hemalatha wrote: “What is sauce for the goose, cannot be soup for the gander.” They held that the contradictory stand taken by the government with respect to the two convicts involved in the same crime was nothing but arbitrary and fails the test of fairness and legal certainty as propounded by the Supreme Court.
The judges pointed out that K. Rajasekar, a widower had a daughter through his first wife. He fathered two more girl children through his second wife R. Shanthi. The birth of the last child placed the couple in a state of emotional distress as they feared they would not be able to bring up all three girl children in the family with their meagre income.
Therefore, the couple smothered the baby girl to death and buried the body in their garden. The Village Administrative Officer, somehow, smelt a rat and when he inquired Rajasekar, the latter spilled the beans. Thereafter, the police registered a case and after a full-fledged trial, a sessions court convicted the couple for the offence of murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment in 1995.
When the State government in 2008 ordered premature release of 1,139 life convicts to commemorate the birth centenary of former Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai, Rajasekar got released since he had completed seven years of imprisonment. His wife Shanthi was not accorded the benefit because she was out of the prison for long and had completed only five years, six months and 24 days in prison.
Subsequently, in 2018, when the government decided to release few more convicts to mark the birth centenary of former Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran, the government refused to order the release of Shanthi on the ground that the crime committed by her was gruesome and therefore she would not be entitled to premature release.
Her husband Rajasekar filed a writ petition challenging the government’s decision and the High Court concurred with his counsel K.S. Govinda Prasad that the government could not apply one yardstick to the husband and another for the wife when it comes to extending the same benefit. The court directed the government to recommend the name of Shanthi too for premature release within a month.
