Murderers Receive Death Penalty for Dalit Deaths in Historic Indian Court Decision

These Dalit ("Untouchable") children live in Maharashtra, India. The same place where six people received the death penalty for murdering a Dalit women and her three children.

Six people have received the death penalty for the murder of four members of a Dalit ("Untouchable") family. The unusual sentence—the first time the death penalty has been invoked for the murder of a Dalit since Indian independence in 1947—was handed down by a court in Maharashtra, India, in late September, according to the BBC.

However, the prosecutor's charge that the murders were caste-related was rejected by the court, causing a public outcry in the country.

The BBC reports that death sentences are a rarity in India, and that most of the punishments are never carried out.

A total of eight people were convicted of the murder of a Dalit farmer's wife, daughter and two sons. Three others were acquitted in the case, which brought international attention to the plight of the Dalits in India.

The slaughter occurred September 29, 2006, in a remote village in Maharashtra. Surekha Bhotmange, along with her 17-year-old daughter, Priyanka, and sons, Roshan, 19, and Sudhir, 21, were murdered by a mob that broke into their home.

The mob, comprised of people from an upper caste, dragged the mother and her children out into the streets and beat them with chains and sticks. The mob stripped the mother's and daughter's clothes, then paraded them naked through the village and raped them before killing them.

Surekha's husband, Bhaiyyalal, escaped the massacre and remained hidden behind a tree helplessly watching.

Family life is a very important part of Indian culture. Bhaiyyalala Bhotmange was force to witness the brutal execution of his wife and children.

Reports about the murder cited two possible motives. One news outlet reported that Bhaiyyalal refused to hand over land that belonged to him to an upper-caste person who wanted it. Another report said that the murders were in retaliation for the Bhotmange family's testimony in a previous assault trial.

Initially, police refused to even take Bhaiyyalal's case. When they finally registered the complaint, valuable evidence from the crime scene was not properly preserved, which weakened the prosecutor's case.

The distraught widower received aid and support from several human rights activists in helping bring the murderers to justice.

It is officially illegal to discriminate against the Dalits. In spite of this, violence against Dalits is escalating. The prosecutors attempted to show that this case was a clear violation of the Prevention of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act. The court decided that the vendetta story was most valid, and refused to prosecute the case as being caste-motivated. This action stirred up the wrath of India's Social Justice Minister, Meira Kumar, who said that if this case and others like it were treated as simply criminal acts, without a caste-based motivation, then the law designed to protect the Dalits would lose its relevance. Meira has demanded an appeal of the verdict in that part of the case.

India's National Crime Records Bureau reports that every day, two Dalits are killed, three Dalit women are raped and a Dalit is assaulted every 18 seconds. These figures only represent the number of reported cases. Thousands of such crimes are never reported.

India's Ministry of Social Justice reports that only about 15 percent of cases filed under the Prevention of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act result in convictions.