HC suspends death penalty of Rampal in 2014 violence case

THe Punjab and Haryana heights margaret court has suspended the lifetime doom of soi-disant godman Rampal in connection with the deaths of five women and a toddler during a police siege at his Hisar ashram in 2014.Rampal, the self-styled godman who heads the Satlok Ashram in Haryana, has been in prison since November 2014 in connection with the murder of five women and an 18-month-old baby. He was arrested on November 19, 2014 following several days of face-off between the police and his supporters outside the ashram in Hisar’s Barwala. Four women were found murdered in the ashram after the stand-off ended and a woman and a toddler later died in hospital. The violence also left 110 police personnel and 70 civilians injured.Rampal’s counsel, senior advocate Vinod Ghai, said a total of five criminal cases were registered against him in the 2014 violence. In separate hearings on August 28 and September 2, the bench of justices Gurvinder Singh Gill and Deepinder Singh Nalwa suspended the sentence of the self-styled godman’s in two cases pertaining to deaths of five women and a child, noting that he has already undergone 10 years, 8 months, and 21 days of actual imprisonment and is 74 years old. The orders in the hearings were made public on Thursday.Rampal was earlier acquitted in two other cases in connection with the case, while the trial in the last case is still underway at a Hisar court and is yet to get bail. Hence, he won’t come out of jail for now.Rampal was convicted by a Hisar court in October 2018 under sections 302 (murder), 343 (wrongful confinement), and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and sentenced to life imprisonment without remission. According to the prosecution, Rampal confined devotees inside the ashram as the police moved in to arrest him in connection with another case, leading to suffocation and stampede-like conditions.On September 2, the bench of justices Gill and Nalwa suspended Rampal’s sentence while hearing his plea against the 2018 order. On August 28, the same bench had suspended his sentence in case of another death at the ashram in 2014.In the hearing onSeptember 2, the bench said: “...we find it to be a fit case for suspending the sentence of the applicant/appellant during pendency of the main appeal. The instant application, as such, is allowed and it is ordered that the remaining sentence of imprisonment of the applicant/appellant shall remain suspended during pendency of the appeal...”