Court says case is not ‘rarest of rare’ to warrant death penalty as the convict is young and there is scope for reform; maintaining Javed Shaikh is innocent, family breaks down as judgment is delivered.Relying heavily on forensic evidence, a special women’s court sentenced Javed Rehman Shaikh, 24, to rigorous imprisonment for life until death for the rape and murder of an eightyear-old girl in 2010.Despite Javed’s plea to the court on Tuesday that he would rather prefer to be sentenced to death than be imprisoned for the rest of his life for a crime “he hadn’t committed,” the court said that his case did not fall in the rarest of rare category.The special court of Judge Vrushali Joshi observed that Javed was very young, which meant that there was a chance for reformation and he had no other criminal cases against him.“The balance sheet between aggravating and mitigating circumstances tilts towards mitigating circumstances. It therefore does not come under the rarest of the rare category,” she observed before a packed courtroom.Javed was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and rape, while he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping along with a fine of Rs 10,000 for each offence.Javed who stayed composed till the end of the day had a steady inflow of visitors rarely seen before, from family and friends to locality members. While almost everyone who met him seemed to be in tears, Javed tried cheering them up. “Mere liye dua karma,” were his parting words to them with a smile on his face.“I used to massage newborns for a living. Javed asked me not to work, for the nth time. My son is as innocent as innocent gets,” said Javed’s mother, who gave up footwear, and jewellery since the time her son was arrested. She told Mirror: “I will put it on the day my son returns.”According to the defence led by Amin Solkar and Sudha Dwivedi, the victim whose rape and murder was being probed, was not the same eight-year-old who had gone missing. They said that just the picture was enough to show that she was 14-15 years of age. And since no bone ossification test had been done, the exact age of the body would never be known. The defence said that the girl who went missing had very short hair and observations made on the body found clearly showed that she had long hair.However the court observed that the scalp of the victim from the photograph showed that she was a minor. Joshi also said that since the hair was detached from the scalp it must have been observed at that time that the girl’s hair was long. Moreover, according to the doctor she seemed to be an eight-year-old.The court also dismissed the defence’s argument that the victim’s father filed a petition in the high court that the body that was found was not his daughter’s body. The court held that the petition was filed after misguiding the father.The judge said: “The father has identified the body; nobody would expect that he would find his missing daughter in such a condition. On the contrary the parents would refuse to accept such a truth. But in this case the father identified the victim’s clothes and her body in the first instance.” The judge further added that the DNA was also a perfect match.Responding to the defence’s allegations that Javed had been falsely implicated and evidence had been created in the form of his hair being found in the victim’s nail, the special judge said: “If they (police) wanted to create false evidence, then they would have implicated him in other cases as well,” referring to the previous two cases of minor girls being found raped and murdered.“DNA reports prove the presence of the accused on the body of the deceased”, the court said.