SC: Mother’s beheading not rarest of rare

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday did not find the murder of a woman by her son out of rage and in frenzy four years ago and then fleeing home with her severed head, a case to be covered under the “rarest of the rare” guidelines for the awarding of death sentence. The court converted the capital punishment to Absar Alam from Bihar into life imprisonment.

A fast track court in the state had awarded death sentence to Absar describing his act of murdering his mother as “extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical and revolting against the social conscience” and the Patna High Court had confirmed the capital punishment to him on July 16, 2009.

While recording the sequence of events in a judgment on Absar’s appeal, a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Swatanter Kumar recorded “he had killed his mother by cutting her neck and severing her head and thereafter fled form the house with the head of his mother leaving behind her body” on the intervening night of February 14/15, 2007.

However, the bench said the accused committed the murder in frenzy after he was sick of a continuous fight between his mother and his wife, who as a result of it had run away from the home to her maternal house.

Absar had been accusing his mother to be the cause for his wife leaving him and after an altercation on the issue “out of anger and excitement severed the neck of his mother and fled with the head,” the top court recorded.

“The appellant was an illiterate rustic and was a cultivator residing in a village with virtually no control over his emotions and had over-reacted impulsively to the situation and committed the crime,” the apex court said adding in such circumstances punishment of life imprisonment was appropriate to him than “condemning” him with death penalty.