A 36-year-old woman, who killed her minor kids and also attempted to commit suicide, has been sentenced to life imprisonment by a Delhi court which said there was no record to show she was mentally unstable at the time of the incident.
Additional Sessions Judge Rakesh Kumar-II, while awarding the jail term to Sonali Sachdev, said though “two valuable lives have been lost”, the case did not fall in the category of rarest of rare.
The court noted that the woman was being treated for severe depressive episode but said there was nothing to show she was mentally unstable at the time of the incident.
“All the defence witnesses deposed about her mental condition from the date she was admitted in Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS) but there is no record to establish that she was mentally unstable at the time of occurrence. Thus, the defence evidence led by the accused is of no help to her,” it said while convicting her.
“….This court is of the considered opinion that the offence was committed by none other than Sonali Sachdev. Hence, she is held guilty for the offence under sections 302 (murder)/309 (attempt to commit suicide) of the IPC.”
Police, after receiving a call in March 2010 that somebody had committed suicide, reached Sonali’s Tilak Nagar house in west Delhi and found her husband Pramod and two children dead and the woman unconscious.
Pramod, who was worried about the admission of their daughter in school, committed suicide. Sonali, after finding her husband dead, also tried to end her life as well as that of her children, police said.
It said that she strangulated her kids with a pillow and tried to end her life by consuming sleeping pills, hanging herself and cutting her vains.
All of them were taken to hospital where Pramod and the two minors were declared dead while the woman underwent treatment.
During trial, she claimed innocence and led evidence in support of her defence.
She sought leniency in sentence saying she was awidow and has remained in jail from March, 2010 till July, 2012 and claimed that the case did not fall in the category of rarest of rare.
The prosecutor, however, said no leniency should be shown to the woman as she had murdered her minor son and daughter and did not care about her relation with the kids.
( Source – PTI )
