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INDIA: BOMBAY HC COMMUTES DEATH SENTENCE OF TWO CONVICTS
August 1, 2019: More than two years after their mercy petitions were rejected by the President, the Bombay High Court on 29 July 2019 commuted the death sentence of two convicts - Purushottam Borate and Pradeep Kokade - for the 2007 kidnapping, rape and murder of a BPO employee in Pune and sentenced them to life imprisonment, observing that the delay in their execution was “undue, inordinate and unreasonable”.
The convicts were to be executed on 24 June at Yerawada Central Prison, but on 21 June, the High Court stated that the execution of the men, who had moved the court urging it to quash their execution warrants and commute their death sentence to life imprisonment, “shall not take place” until further orders of the court.
The HC has now handed a 35-year imprisonment sentence to the two, which includes the period they have already spent in jail. The court observed that in the mercy petitions filed by the two death row convicts, letters exchanged between different government departments bore the words “most urgent” and “death penalty” and yet the matter “did not receive the attention it deserved”. (Sources: indianexpress.com, 01/08/2019)
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