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Men convicted for raping, killing BPO staffer in Pune seek mercy

Highly placed sources in the home department confirmed that the duo has sought mercy from the Governor. The department, however, has recommended no mercy plea for them.

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Two men who raped and murdered a BPO employee in Pune in 2007 have moved a mercy plea before the Maharashtra Governor. The convicts – cab driver Purushottam Dasharath Borate and his wall-painter friend Pradeep Yashwant Kokade – were sentenced to death by the Supreme Court in May 2015 for raping and killing 22-year-old Jyotikumari Chaudhary. The apex court had said the two were a threat to the society and deserved no leniency.

Highly placed sources in the home department confirmed that the duo has sought mercy from the Governor. The department, however, has recommended no mercy plea for them.

Awarding the punishment, a bench of chief justice H L Dattu and justices S A Bobde and Arun Mishra had said the manner in which an innocent and helpless woman was raped and murdered shocked and repulsed the collective conscience of the community and the court, warranting award of death penalty to deter other potential offenders from committing such crimes.

"This court has no hesitation in holding that this case falls within the category of rarest of rare, which merits death penalty and none else. The collective conscience of the community is so shocked by this crime that imposing an alternate sentence, ie a sentence of life imprisonment, on the accused persons would not meet the ends of justice," it had said.

Jyotikumari had boarded the regular cab contracted by the company to report for night shift on November 1, 2007. Driver Borate and his friend Kokade changed the route, took her to a remote place and raped her. After sexually assaulting her, the duo strangled her to death and disfigured her face, inflicting injuries with a sharp weapon to hide her identity.

The court had expressed concern that such crimes against women were increasing and particularly against those working in night shifts. It had said there were a "shockingly" large number of cases where the sentence of punishment awarded to the accused was not in proportion to the gravity of the offence, thereby encouraging criminals and making justice suffer by weakening the system's credibility.

Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Dattu had said, "Society today has been infected with a lawlessness that has gravely undermined social order. Protection of society and stamping out criminal proclivity must be the object of law, which may be achieved by imposing appropriate sentence."

Borate had pleaded for leniency, saying he was the sole breadwinner for his family of a young wife, minor children and old parents. The bench had replied, "With the gruesome act of raping a victim who had reposed her trust in the accused followed by a cold-blooded and brutal murder coupled with the calculated and remorseless conduct of the accused after the commission of the offence, we cannot resist from concluding that depravity of the appellants' offence would attract no lesser sentence than the death penalty."

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