Chandigarh, Aug. 13 -- The Punjab and Haryana high court has commuted a death sentence to 50 years in jail in a case of the rape and murder of a 7-year-old girl reported in Kaithal in 2022.

"It is one of those rare cases where the line that separates the categories of the "rarest of rare" from "rare" is on the razor's edge. The biggest challenge before this court is that when the death penalty is not imposed and when executive policies permit early release, how do we save the girls from the perverts who, after committing rape, kill them to destroy the evidence?," the bench of justice Anoop Chitkara and justice RC Dimri observed, adding that the law and the judicial precedents permit the court to commute death to life till the end of natu...