Tandoor case: Sharma moves SC

Former Youth Congress leader Sushil Sharma on Thursday moved the Supreme Court challenging his death sentence in the Naina Sahni murder case.

Sharma has challenged the Delhi high court judgment that upheld the trial court verdict finding him guilty of murdering his wife Naina in 1995 on suspicion that she was having an extra-marital affair.

In the petition, sources said, he has contended that the high court has erroneously concluded that the offence committed by him falls under the category of rarest of rare, warranting capital punishment.

The high court, on February 19, had confirmed the death penalty awarded to him by the trial court saying the offence was an act of extreme depravity that shook the conscience of the society.

A bench of Justices R S Sodhi and P K Bhasin had held that the reasoning given by the trial court for convicting and awarding death sentence to Sharma in the case, popularly known as the Tandoor case, was justified and he did not deserve any mercy for the gruesome killing of his wife.

The high court had rejected the mercy plea of reducing the death sentence into life imprisonment for Sharma who murdered his wife and then disposed of her body by burning it in a tandoor.

It had rejected his contention that the offence was committed on a spur of moment. The trial court on November 7, 2003 had sentenced Sharma to death for killing his wife at their residence in Gole Market area in central Delhi on the intervening night of July 2-3, 1995.