Now Reading: Supreme Court upholds life term for witch-hunt murder
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Supreme Court upholds life term for witch-hunt murder
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the life sentence of a man convicted of murdering a woman over allegations that she practised witchcraft in Odisha's Rourkela in 1998. A Bench of Justices…
The Story in Brief
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the life sentence of a man convicted of murdering a woman over allegations that she practised witchcraft in Odisha's Rourkela in 1998. A Bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and NV Anjaria affirmed the trial court and Orissa High Court rulings, finding the direct evidence of the victim's daughter, an eyewitness, to be compelling and reliable.
The Court expressed concern that witch-hunting still plagues Indian society, where superstition and irrational fear often override constitutional morality. It noted that victims are mostly women subjected to violence and social ostracisation. The judgment rejected arguments to reduce the conviction from murder to culpable homicide, citing the brutal nature of the assault on vital body parts.
The Indian Opinion
The narrative that witch-hunting is a rural aberration fading with modernity gets punctured by such cases. The Supreme Court's strong language against superstition is welcome, but the real test is whether this judgment prompts state governments to actually enforce anti-witch-hunting laws and fund awareness campaigns. Will the Odisha police, for instance, now treat every such allegation as a potential murder plot rather than a family dispute? That hard statistic will tell if the message has landed.
Source: barandbench.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
