Chandigarh, March 20 -- The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday commuted the death sentence of a rape and murder convict to life term. The convict Sonu Singh (28) had raped and killed a 4-year -old girl in Ludhiana in December 2023. The high court bench of justice Anoop Chitkara and justice Sukhvinder Kaur ordered that the accused shall not be released unless he has served a minimum actual sentence of fifty years, without counting remissions. The court has also imposed a fine of Rs.75 lakh on the accused and said that whatever amount is recovered should be given to the victim's parents and siblings in equal shares. On December 28, 2023, the 4-year-old victim, referred to as Laadli by the court, was allegedly taken away by Singh from the tea stall of her maternal grandfather to the house of his cousin Ashok Kumar, where he had been residing. The house was opposite the victim's home. Singh raped the minor and throttled her to death, and concealed her dead body in the bed box. He discreetly fled away and was arrested after 20 days in Uttar Pradesh. He was awarded a death sentence by the trial court on March 27, 2025. He had appealed against the conviction order, and the trial court had also sent the murder reference for confirmation. The high court said that an analysis of the evidence fully establishes that the chain of circumstances is complete, concrete, and leads to the sole inference of Singh's guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. It appears that the act of murder was in the aftermath of panic to destroy the evidence of rape, and not a premeditated act, it added. While deciding on the sentence, the court said that the convict's life should not be taken away by the judicial process, and instead, to save the children and females, he can be incapacitated by imposing an appropriate sentence that is also proportionate to the heinous and gruesome crime of raping and killing a girl aged 4 years and 7 months. "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 court observed. In commuting the death sentence to life, the court referred to some shortcomings in the investigation and said that although the same would not have any bearing on the outcome of the conviction, still can be "an additional factor" that does not warrant the capital punishment. 'Case demonstrates a clear systemic failure' The court further observed that the facts of the case demonstrate a clear systemic failure of our institutions and communities at all levels. "So, what was Laadli's fault? Was it that she was born in a region where a female, irrespective of her age, is seen by perverts as an object to satisfy lust? Probably, these males became perverts because no one taught them at home or in school to respect a female as an equal human being?" the court said, adding that her only fault was that she was born female, and that was just a 'coincidence.' ".all the tell-tale signs of crime point out that she was raped and murdered because Laadli was a vulnerable female, and in the perverted sight of the accused, moulded by the unfortunate conditioning of our own society, Laadli remained nothing but an object, a means to satiate the accused's insatiable lust," the court said, adding that somewhere between teaching and learning, our curriculum and society failed to educate 'bharatiya primitive males" basic respect for life and recognition of the dignity of other genders, or simply how to live as civilised human beings as in the present case, where the accused faltered in understanding the difference between a "social animal and a beast."...