Additional sessions judge, Vinod Kumar, of Patiala house court in New Delhi, on 11th August’08, sentenced to death two taxi drivers for Raping and then brutally killing an Australian lady, Dawn Emilie Griggs, aged 59 and a teacher and writer, who came to India for joining a meditation course.
As per the prosecution, the cabbies, Jyotish Prasad, 28, and Ashis Kumar, 33, both residents of Bihar, drove the lady to a remote place near a Delhi airport where she arrived on 17th March’04 and has hired the pre-paid Taxi. There they tried to rape her and as she resisted, they gagged her and raped repeatedly.
As she continued resisting, they panicked and killed her in a ghastly manner by first gouging out her eyes by a screwdriver from the tool-box of the Taxi and then smashed her face to avoid identification.
In the 17-page judgment, the judge said in a packed courtroom also attended by foreign press, “I award death sentence to both the convicts under section 302 of Indian Penal Code. Both the convicts be hanged till death.”
The judge linked the case to the Supreme Court judgment in the case of murder of Hetal Parekh, 13, in Calcutta, by the watchman Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was executed on 14th August 2004 for rape and murder of the minor in 1990.
The judge in his order further said, “If the facts are seen closely, it would be found that the gravity of the case is more than the case (the case of Dhananjay Chatterjee) before Supreme Court. The victim was of such age that the convicts should have seen her as a mother figure. More over she was a foreigner and totally defenseless and unprotected. Committing rape on such an old lady shows a mindset more depraved than Chatterjee’s.”
As there was no eyewitness, the prosecution built up the case on circumstantial evidences and proved rape by conducting DNA test of the victim. The prosecution demanded strict punishment saying the crime was a stigma on a nation that treats ‘guests as gods.’