Supreme Court: In its 98-page judgement, the bench noted that the appellant was accused of enticing a seven-year-old girl to accompany him on the pretext of picking fruits and thereafter raped her. New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday commuted the death sentence, awarded to a man for raping and murdering a seven-year-old girl, to life imprisonment saying it cannot be said that there is no probability of the convict being reformed and rehabilitated. The top court, while upholding his conviction for the offences including that of murder and rape under the Indian Penal Code and the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, said the convict shall not be entitled to premature release or remission before undergoing actual imprisonment for 30 years. A bench headed by Justice A M Khanwilkar delivered its verdict on the appeal against the October 2017 judgement of the Allahabad High Court which had confirmed the death sentence awarded to the convict by the trial court. The trial court had in December 2016 convicted the man for several offences and sentenced him to death for the offence under section 302 (murder) of the IPC. “The appellant was about 33-34 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime in the year 2015. Looking to the overall facts and circumstances, in our view, it would be just and proper to award the punishment of imprisonment for life to the appellant for the offence under section 302 IPC while providing for actual imprisonment for a minimum period of 30 years,” said the bench, also comprising Justices Dinesh Maheshwari and C T Ravikumar. In its 98-page judgement, the bench noted that the appellant was accused of enticing a seven-year-old girl to accompany him on the pretext of picking fruits and thereafter raped her. It also noted that the appellant had murdered her and dumped the body near a bridge on a riverbank. The bench said both the trial court as also the high court had taken the abhorrent nature of the crime alone to be the decisive factor for awarding death sentence in the case. “In other words, the impugned orders awarding and confirming death sentence could only be said to be of assumptive conclusions, where it has been assumed that death sentence has to be awarded because of the ghastly crime and its abhorrent nature,” it said. The top court said the heinous nature of the crime, like that in this case, definitely discloses aggravating circumstances, particularly when the manner of its commission shows depravity and shocks the conscience. It said at the same time, it is noticeable that the appellant has no criminal antecedents, comes from a very poor socio-economic background, has a family as well as unblemished jail conduct.