JABALPUR/BHOPAL: Satna district court has issued the “death warrant” — final order for execution — against a schoolteacher convicted of raping a four-year-old girl. The child was violated so brutally that she had to spend months in AIIMS-Delhi, enduring multiple surgeries, to get her intestines realigned.
The execution date for Mahendra Singh Gond has been fixed for March 2 in Jabalpur jail. Officials say he will be hanged unless Supreme Court orders a stay. From crime to confirmation of death sentence, it took only seven months. If he is executed, it would be the first under the new law to hang child rapists.
Gond had abducted the child on the night of June 30, 2018, raped her in the jungles and dumped her there, thinking she was dead. Her family members found her in the wee hours, barely alive, and took her to hospital. The state government immediately had her airlifted to Delhi. The crime shocked the nation. Police acted swiftly and arrested Gond within hours.
Led by DSP Kiron Kiro, police presented a watertight chargesheet and a sessions court in Nagod handed him the capital punishment on September 19. The conviction was unique in that the survivor’s statement was taken via videoconferencing and proved vital in proving him guilty.
A division bench of MP high court confirmed the death sentence on January 25, 2019, holding his crime to be “rarest of rare”. Justice P K Jaiswal and Justice Anjuli Palo said: “Courts cannot evade their duty to be tough with hard-core criminals so that there is some deterrent against indulging in such gruesome crimes, particularly because such crimes are on the rise. The incident assumes greater significance because the person involved is a teacher, who is supposed to teach lessons in morality to his students.”
After the high court confirmed the death sentence, Satna district and sessions court issued the “black warrant” against Gond.
Gopal Tamrakar, superintendent of Jabalpur Central Jail — the only prison in MP to have a gallows — told TOI that they have received an e-mail from Satna court regarding execution of a rape convict. “But the hard copy, which is personally delivered by a messenger, has not been received so far. According to the email, Gond will be executed at 5am on March 2,” he said. Tamrakar, however, cautioned that the convict has not exhausted all the legal remedies available to him and hanging could still be stopped by Supreme Court or the President.
In June 11, 2010, Supreme Court had stayed the execution of Mangal Singh Barela, who was convicted for axing his entire family to death, barely hours before he was to be hanged. The apex court has also stayed execution of a person from Singrauli town of MP, who was convicted for the rape and murder of a four-year-old girl on September 18, 2018.
The last person to be hanged in Madhya Pradesh was Kamta Prasad, from Budhar town in Shahdol district. He was executed in Jabalpur Central Jail in 1996 for murder.
In 2018, trial courts in MP sentenced as many as 21 persons to death — 19 of them for rape or rape/murder of girls less than 12 years of age — under the new law enacted in April 2018. MP high court has confirmed death sentences in five cases, and commuted seven to life imprisonment or ‘jailed till death’. The rest of the cases are still being heard.