The Madras High Court on Saturday upheld the conviction and life sentence awarded to eight persons by the Madurai special sessions court in the murder of Gokulraj, a Scheduled Caste engineering student, in 2015. The HC changed the charges against the two accused and imposed five years imprisonment. The victim Gokulraj was allegedly murdered by the accused under the suspicion of him having a relationship with a woman from the dominant case.
According to PTI, the order was pronounced in an appeal petition moved by 10 people against March 2022 Madurai special sessions court judgment handing out life imprisonment till death to them without remission in a sentence.
When the case came up for hearing on Friday, a division bench comprising justices M S Ramesh and N Anand Venkatesh dismissed their appeals. The court also confirmed the earlier verdict in the case.
The bench, as per PTI, said, "No perversity was found in the trial court's judgment convicting the accused. We remained conscious of the fact that moral conviction has no place in criminal jurisprudence."
The court examined the details of the case including Gokulraj's temple visit with the woman with whom he was allegedly in a relationship, the severed body of Gokulraj recovered from the train track and the move behind the crime. The court also reviewed prime accused Yuvaraj's conduct after the incident and scientific evidence produced in the case.
On June 23, 2015, Gokulraj suddenly went missing. He was last spotted with a woman in a temple in Tiruchengode. The police then found the headless body of Gokulraj on the railway track in Namakkal. The police initially booked a case under suspicious death but later altered the sections to murder. "The post-mortem report stated that it was not a suicide but a cold-blooded murder and a culpable homicide," claimed former special public prosecutor Bhavani B Mohan, who appeared for the state, as per the report.