Chandigarh, July 9 -- The Punjab and Haryana high court has commuted the death penalty of a Haryana man to life imprisonment. He was convicted for the 2021 rape and murder of a six-year-old tribal girl in Palwal. On July 29, 2023, a trial court in Palwal had sentenced Anand Singh, a local, to death sentence for the rape and murder of a girl. According to the prosecution, on May 24, 2021, the girl - referred to by the court as "Laadli" - was alone at her home. Her parents, migrant labourers from Madhya Pradesh, had gone to work. In the afternoon, the father received a phone call informing him that his daughter was missing. He filed a police complaint, suspecting his neighbour's involvement. The next day, police arrested the neighbour, 27-year-old Anand Singh. Later, the body of the girl was recovered from an agricultural field. "The evidence proved on the record establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the chain of circumstances is complete, concrete, and leads to the sole inference of Anand Singh's guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Resultantly, the conviction of Singh for the commission of the rape and murder of Laadli, punishable under Section 6 of the POCSO Act and Section 302 of the IPC is upheld," the HC division bench said. On the issue of whether he be awarded death sentence, the court said it appears that the subsequent act of murder was committed in the aftermath of panic to destroy the evidence of rape, rather than a premeditated act. "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? The concern bigger than the rape upon a child was her murder, because she had been raped and, if she had survived, would have named the accused who resided in the same area," it recorded. "Once implicated, the punishment for rape of a child is the same, if not more, than that of murder. Section 6 of POCSO Act and the judicial precedents on Section 302 of the IPC permit us to commute death to life till the end of natural life. However, we have to take a conscious decision by sending an underlying message that the irreparable of the two crimes was her murder, because if the accused had not strangulated her to death, medical science might have saved her life, and no one can rule out this possibility; however, to ensure that this pervert is not a potential risk to the other girls, he must remain in prison till the sunset of his virility," it said, awarding life sentence with the stipulation that he shall not be released unless he has served 50 years of sentence and imposed a fine of Rs 50 lakh....