Kerala High Court upheld the death penalty of the accused in the Perumbavoor Jisha murder case. The Division Bench of the High Court dismissed the plea filed by the accused, Ameerul Islam, a native of Assam, seeking acquittal. The High Court upheld the trial court’s verdict of the rarest of the brutal murders.

Rejecting the verdict upheld by the High Court, Islam’s criminal lawyer Advocate Biju Antony Aloor, popularly known as B A Aloor, said they would approach the Supreme Court against the verdict. Antony claimed that Islam was innocent and someone else had committed the crime.

Jisha (29), a native of Perumbavoor and a law student, was killed on 28 April 2016. Islam murdered her after trespassing into the one-room house of the Hindu woman. The autopsy report stated that Jisha was brutally raped. There were 38 wounds on the body of the young victim.

Islam was arrested fifty days later, in June 2016, after the investigation. The accused was arrested from Kanchipuram. The suspect was interrogated at an anonymous centre in Thrissur and later brought to the Aluva Police Club and arrested.

Islam told the police that some time ago, a woman had beaten him near a river where locals come to bathe and wash their clothes. Jisha had laughed on seeing this, and this was the provocation for the murder.

At the same time, Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) B Sandhya told the media that the arrest of the accused had been recorded and said that she could not divulge more details as the identification parade was to be held. The accused was presented to the media after completing the formalities.

Islam, who lived near Jisha’s house, acted up with her several times. According to the police, the accused, who was addicted to alcohol and sexual perversion, misbehaved with Jisha on the morning of 28 April, the day of the murder. Jisha’s responded harshly, triggering the violence.

After returning intoxicated in the evening, Islam trespassed the house, raped and strangled Jisha to death. He mutilated the body with the weapon in hand. Jisha’s intestines had come out.

It was reported that after the murder, Islam left his footwear, cleaned himself in the canal near the house and escaped to Assam. When the police investigation was extended to Assam, the accused reached Palakkad and was arrested there.

The DNA samples collected from Islam’s footwear, Jisha’s dead body and inside the house are crucial in the case. After seeing the second sketch of the accused, a shoe shop owner in Kuruppampady (five kilometres from Perumbavoor) alerted the police about the accused. The investigation also focused on the mobile tower location of the accused and ended in him getting captured.

After the incident, Islam did not call anyone else for some time, and the police observed his absence. After a few days, the accused called some friends and asked them for the case details. When the investigation extended to Assam, it became clear that the accused was at the Palakkad border. A special team led by ADGP B Sandhya traced the accused.

Islam confessed to the crime when the investigation team took him into custody and interrogated him. His blood was sent for DNA testing. Even before the DNA test results were available, the police had received circumstantial evidence to confirm that Islam was Jisha’s killer.

Adv Antony claimed in the plea that Islam was innocent and he did not know Jisha. The police fabricated the evidence, and they created scientific evidence after arresting him, so he should be released.

All the matters in the case have been presented to the court in detail, claimed Adv Antony. The only medical evidence is that the accused harmed the lady, but it has been repeatedly told to the court that the accused was not the one who assaulted her. The court did not consider any of these matters a second time.

A new investigation team led by B Sandhya found that Islam committed the crime. The investigating officer, Superintendent of Police (SP) PN Unnirajan, was also not ready to investigate the others involved in the case. The director general of police (DGP) (Lokanath Behera IPS) also believed the case was not studied scientifically.

Adv Antony said the Supreme Court should examine every matter in the judgment. Everything has been enumerated in the appeal.

Antony claimed he was pained since he could not save an innocent. Islam is not strong enough to tackle someone and rape/kill her. Someone else committed the murder, but the investigation team did not look into this aspect. He hoped that everything would be revealed in the Supreme Court.

Shoranur Soumya Murder Case

On 1 February 2011, Soumya, a 23-year-old woman from Shoranur, was raped and murdered while she was travelling in a passenger train from Ernakulam to Shoranur. A necrophile named Charley Thomas, (30) alias Govindachamy from Tamil Nadu was found guilty in the rape and murder case of Soumya by the Thrissur fast track court on 31 October 2011.

Thomas, who is a habitual offender, caught Soumya by her hair and forcibly hit her head repeatedly on the walls of the compartment after she resisted his assault. The criminal threw her out of the moving train and leapt from the other side of the speeding train. He sprinted to her and hauled her up to a shaded spot by the side of the rail.

With haste, he tore off her dress and raped the girl while her face swelled with blood from the wounds on her head and face. Thomas robbed her mobile phone and left the victim motionless and in a state of nudity. Though she was found and hospitalised, she breathed her last on 6 February.

Thomas had undergone imprisonment in eight cases in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and the trial of another robbery case was in progress. The court later gave him a death sentence, and the Kerala High Court upheld the verdict.

A Supreme Court bench composed of Ranjan Gogoi, Prafulla C. Pant and Uday Umesh Lalit set aside murder charges and altered to rigorous imprisonment for seven years. The bench was not convinced that the convict had ‘intention’ to cause murder because the victim survived for a couple of days after the incident and eventually died in hospital.

Antony Aloor appeared for the criminal Thomas in all courts. It is feared that we will see a repeat of the Soumya murder case when the Jisha case reaches the Supreme Court. As alleged, will Bharat’s criminal justice system again prove to be mere farce?