Three young men were today awarded death penalty for kidnapping, gangraping and killing a 19-year-old girl with a Delhi court saying that the convicts showed extreme sense of brutality and depravity "forfeiting their right to live".
The court said their offence fell under "rarest of the rare" category and life imprisonment would be "highly inadequate" as they are "menace to the society".
"The rape and murder of a girl in her teens are a distinct class of offences and cannot be equated to cases involving only rape or only murder. It is combination of two distinct heinous offences calling for capital punishment.
"The perpetrators of crime like rape and murder forfeit their right to live. Life imprisonment is highly inadequate in these cases and there is no alternative but to impose death sentence. These criminals are a menace to the society and they don't deserve to be kept alive..," Additional Sessions Judge Virender Bhat said.
"....The convicts shall be hanged till death," the judge said and imposed a fine of Rs 1.6 lakh each on them.
The three youths--Rahul (27), Ravi (23) and Vinod (23)-- were arrested and booked for offences of kidnapping, unnatural sex, gangrape and murder of the girl on intervening night of February 9 and 10, 2012.
The court, however, acquitted them of the charges of unnatural sex, saying no such evidence was found against them.
According to the prosecution, the girl, who was working in Gurgaon's Cyber City, was abducted by the three in a car near her house in Qutub Vihar here and was gangraped and murdered by them on February 9, 2012.
Additional Public Prosecutor Satwinder Kaur, who sought death penalty for the three, had said the crime committed by them was immensely brutal and aroused feeling of extreme indignation, as the victim's mutilated body was found three days after the incident from a field in Rodhai village in Haryana's Rewari district.
She had said the three youths had poured acid into the victim's eyes and had inserted a broken liquor bottle into her private parts.
