HC to hear petition for death for Soren

New Delhi: A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court will hear a petition seeking death sentence for former union minister Shibu Soren and four others in the Shashinath Jha murder case.

On February 19, the family members of Shashinath Jha had moved the Delhi HC seeking death sentence for Soren.

Filing a revision petition before the Bench of Justice Manmohan Sarin and S L Bhayana, Jha's mother Priyambada Devi and his daughters sought enhancement of the sentence from life imprisonment to death penalty.

Death penalty would be an adequate deterrent to the class of persons to which the convicts belong, said the petition.

Soren and four other co-accused were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment last year for killing Jha in 1994.

Shashinath Jha, who was Shibu Soren's private secretary, was reportedly abducted from Delhi and later murdered in a residential colony in Ranchi.

The petition asserted that Jha's daughters had been orphaned and it was not easy to live without the father.

In the petition, they also sought enhancement of compensation from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 50 lakh saying that Kavita and Preeti, daughters of Jha, could not earn their livelihood and had received only "token compensation" which was of no significance.

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