24 October 2024 :
The Bombay High Court on October 1st, 2024 upheld the death penalty awarded to a Kolhapur man for murdering his mother by disembowelling her body to eat her body parts in 2017.
A division bench of Justices Revati Mohite-Dere and Prithviraj K Chavan passed the judgment on pleas by state government seeking confirmation of death sentence awarded to Sunil Rama Kuchkoravi. He is presently lodged at Yerwada Central Prison.
“We confirm the sentence of death. The convict is informed about his right to take an appeal before the Supreme Court in 30 days. The convict not only murdered his mother but also removed her body parts and he was about to cook her heart and was about to eat it. This is a case of cannibalism and we found it worth it to be of the rarest of rare category. There is no scope for his reformation as his tendency is cannibalism. It is a barbaric grotesque murder of the mother,” the bench noted.
The prosecution claimed that Kuchkoravi murdered his 60-year-old mother Yallava Rama Kuchkoravi on the afternoon of August 28, 2017, in Makadwala Vasahat in Kolhapur city. He later desecrated the body and ate some of the organs after frying them in a pan.
In July 2021, the sessions court in Kolhapur convicted Kuchkoravi and sentenced him to be hanged to death.
The trial court observed it was “the rarest of the rare” cases and said it “shook the social conscience of the society.”
The sessions court also observed that there was no repentance or remorse in Kuchkoravi’s behaviour following committing the crime.
“The pain which she (the mother) had experienced cannot be explained in words. He has committed the offence in order to satisfy his lust for liquor. He forcibly eliminated the life of his helpless mother, which is the ultimate insult of motherhood,” additional sessions judge Mahesh Krishnaji Jadhav observed then.
The high court also sought psychiatric and a psychological report, as well as a probation welfare officer’s report of Kuchkoravi.
In February last year, the high court allowed Kuchkoravi to attend his daughter’s wedding with a police escort.
