For 'brutal and diabolical' murder, Chandrakant Jha gets death

For the second of the three murders that he was held guilty of, Chandrakant Jha (46) was handed the death penalty by a city court on Tuesday.

Jha has been held guilty for the murders of Dalip (25), Upender Singh (20) and Amit — between November 2006 and May 2007. He has also been named as an accused in at least four other murder cases.

Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau sentenced Jha to death for the murder of Upender Singh in April 2007. On Monday, Jha was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Dalip.

The court held that Jha "followed a definite pattern" in the multiple murders, where he "killed the victims by decapitating their heads and, thereafter, chopped the body and threw the decapitated bodies of these young men outside the Tihar Central Jail and scattered their dismembered body parts at various places around Delhi."

ASJ Lau said Upender had been decapitated in an "extremely brutal, diabolical, revolting and dastardly manner" and held that the case fell within the definition of "rarest of the rare" since it was not only "in cold blood and without any immediate provocation", but there was also the "probability that the convict would again commit a similar act of violence and constitute a continuing threat to the society".

A resident of Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh, Upender worked with Jha in the Azadpur Sabzi Mandi and lived with with him in Haiderpur.

Jha reportedly never expressed any remorse for his actions. He instead dared police to catch him in letters left with the dismembered bodies.

Upender's headless and limbless body was found packed in a carton outside Gate 3 of Tihar Jail, from which the Forensic teams lifted Jha's fingerprints, tying him to the crime.

Jha threw one arm outside Tis Hazari court. The other arm and the genitals were packed in two cartons and left by Jha at a fruit market in Loni, East Delhi.

One of Upender's legs was found near Ram Mandir in Pitampura. His head was never found, and he was identified through DNA match with his parents.

Upender's relative Pankaj Rathore testified that when he had asked Jha about Upender over the phone, Jha told him that Upender had been "sent where he deserved".

Noting the manner in which Jha had befriended and brutally murdered his victims, the court observed that he did "not possess basic humanness and lacked the psyche or mind-set, which may be amenable for any reform."

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/for-brutal-and-diabolical-murder-chandrakant-jha-gets-death/1069895/0