*Posted: Wed Jan 26 2011, 00:12 hrs New Delhi: * To do away with any misreading of its intention in the Graham Staines’ murder judgment, the Supreme Court on Tuesday replaced remarks linking the gruesome deaths of the Australian missionary and his two sons to his religious work.
This time, the bench of Justices P Sathasivam and B S Chauhan chose far plainer terms to explain the reasons for dismissing the CBI appeal for death penalty to Dara Singh, the main accused in the triple murder case. Staines and his sons, Philip and Timothy, aged 10 and 6 respectively, were burnt to death on the midnight of January 22-23, 1999. The decision to delete the remarks is the Supreme Court’s own, and comes days after the bench pronounced the judgment on January 21. Instead of its earlier finding that the “intention” behind the murders was to “teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity” to explain why the case is not the “rarest of rare” to deserve a death penalty, the bench on Tuesday replaced it with the explanation that “more than 12 years have elapsed” since the crime. “In the case on hand, even though Graham Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while they were sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach a lesson to Graham Staines about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity. All these aspects have been correctly appreciated by the High Court and modified the sentence of death into life imprisonment with which we concur,” the bench had written earlier in the judgment. On Tuesday, this paragraph was replaced: “However, more than 12 years have elapsed since the act was committed, we are of the opinion that the life sentence awarded by the High Court need not be enhanced in view of the factual position discussed in the earlier paras.” The length of a trial in a murder case is generally not considered a mitigating factor while deciding the punishment for a capital offence. Likewise an earlier observation that “It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other” is not so specific anymore. This time, the paragraph is sanitised: “There is no justification for interfering in someone’s religious belief by any means.” http://www.indianexpress.com/news/sc-drops-para-on-conversion-and-intent-in-staines-verdict/742162/0