The Supreme Court has commuted the death sentence of a man from Karnataka accused of killing his two children, citing a lack of criminal antecedents and flawed sentencing process, Bar and Bench reported on Wednesday.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sanjay Karol and Sandeep Mehta on February 13 reduced the sentence to life imprisonment without remission after noting that the trial court and the Karnataka High Court had not properly weighed mitigating factors before giving the death penalty.

“The appellant-convict had no criminal antecedents, had good relations with the deceased persons and all mitigating circumstances were not considered by the trial court,” Bar and Bench quoted the Supreme Court as saying.

Both the courts, therefore, failed to meet the strict legal standard for imposing capital punishment, said the bench.

“We direct that the hangman’s noose be taken off the appellant-convict’s neck, and instead that he remains in prison till the end of his days given by God Almighty,” Live Law quoted the bench as saying.

The convict, Ramesh A Naika, was a former manager at Punjab National Bank and was accused of murdering his two children in June 2010 after a dispute with his wife’s family about the relationship of his sister-in-law with her co-worker.

The prosecution said that Naika allegedly first killed his sister-in-law and mother-in-law in Tumkur district and dumped their bodies in a water sump at his house, Bar and Bench reported. He subsequently decided to kill his children, aged 10 and 3.5 years old, and then die by suicide, Live Law reported.

The next day, Naika took his children, who were living with his wife in Mangaluru, on the pretext of an outing and drowned them in a water tank in a secluded farm, Bar and Bench reported.

The present conviction was on the murder of the children, according to Live Law. Naika was tried separately for his sister-in-law and mother-in-law’s murder.

In 2013, a trial court sentenced him to death after analysing circumstantial evidence and finding him guilty. It said that the crime could be placed under the “rarest of rare” category. In 2017, the Karnataka High Court upheld the decision and said that the brutality of the act warranted capital punishment.

Following this, Naika moved the Supreme Court and said that the two lower courts had not taken into account the mitigative and aggravating circumstances in his favour for the commutation of the death sentence to a life imprisonment.

In its order on February 13, the Supreme Court said that factors such as no criminal antecedents, good behaviour in custody, good relations with family and the possibility of reformation could be considered while commuting a death sentence to life imprisonment, Live Law reported.

“A perusal of the order of sentencing reveals that the learned counsel for the appellant-convict had presented other circumstances, which, in his submission, were mitigating in nature, but the same were not taken into consideration by the trial court,” the bench said. “It is a case resting entirely on circumstantial evidence.”

It added that courts should see whether a convict was beyond reform before issuing a death sentence. The mere brutality of a crime did not automatically warrant capital punishment, the bench said.

“The rule only is that the circumstantial evidence ought to be unimpeachable, and the matter at hand be an exceptional case, or the evidence be so convincing that the option of imposition of any other penalty stands foreclosed in the judicial mind,” the order said.

The bench also noted the importance of the principle “live and let live” while referring to the crime, which was triggered by his dislike for his sister-in-law’s relationship.