Asafak Alam, the migrant labourer from Bihar, happens to be the only convict to be given capital punishment in Kerala this year.
K. Soman, Additional District and Sessions Judge, Ernakulam, who is also the special judge for trial of cases relating to atrocities and sexual violence against women and children, gave Alam the death sentence after he was convinced that the case belonged to the ‘rarest of rare’ for which the death penalty could be prescribed.
Last year, the Additional District Court-II, Mavelikkara, gave the death penalty to Lablu Hussain, a Bangladesh native, for brutally killing an elderly couple at Venmony, near Chengannur, in 2019.
Earlier, then Thiruvananthapuram Principal District and Sessions Judge V. Shircy convicted a techie, Nino Mathew, for killing the three-year-old daughter and mother-in-law of his colleague and lover Anu Shanthi. Mathew was given the death sentence in 2016. The court awarded life imprisonment to Shanthi for conniving with Mathew in the double murder.
The trial in the sensational murder of a law student at Perumbavoor in 2016 saw N. Anilkumar, then Principal District and Sessions Judge, convicting the accused, Amer-ul-Islam, and awarding him the death sentence. The conviction in the case was influenced by the punishment awarded to the accused in the Nirbhaya case in New Delhi, where a young girl was raped, tortured, and killed in a moving bus. While the Nirbhaya case triggered a series of public protests demanding justice for the victim and steps for women’s safety, the Perumbavoor case led to an uproar in the State as the incident took place at a time when the State was heading for Assembly polls.
The cruelty committed to the victim in the Perumbavoor case resembled the fate of the woman in the Nirbhaya case, where some of the accused were given the death sentence. The Perumbavoor girl, who sustained 51 wounds in her body, had resisted the sexual attack on her, legal sources said.
