Bengaluru: The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday lifted a legal bar on the execution of the serial killer and rapist Umesh Reddy alias B A Umesh by dismissing a petition filed by him against President of India’s denial of mercy in 2012.
In 2006, Reddy (52), a former police constable, was sentenced to death by a sessions court in Bengaluru for the rape and murder of Jayashree Subbaiah. He was charged in over 21 cases of rape and murder, but he was eventually convicted of the Jayashree Subbaiah murder after her five-year-old son testified that he had seen Reddy leave the victim’s house after the murder.
Reddy’s death sentence was upheld by the Karnataka High Court in 2009, and by the Supreme Court in 2011. According to the Supreme Court, Reddy could not be rehabilitated and Subbaiah’s murder was the rarest of rare cases. As a result, he filed a mercy petition against the death sentence in 2012, but the Karnataka government rejected the appeal, and the President of India subsequently rejected it on May 12, 2013.
Reddy appealed to the High Court against the rejection of his mercy petition by the President of India in 2016 and sought a direction for commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment. It had been five years since the case had been filed. A division bench of the High Court comprising Justices Aravind Kumar and Pradeep Singh Yerur dismissed Reddy’s petition on Wednesday.
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Karnataka’s crime annals have a notorious presence in Reddy. In 2013 a B-grade Kannada film, ‘Khatarnak’, explored Reddy’s crimes and life. In many parts of India, including Gujarat, Reddy has been accused of rape. As a result of the rape and murder of Subbaiah at her home on February 28, 1998, he fell from grace. Following his arrest for the murder in 1999, Reddy escaped from custody twice. He was arrested in 2002 and has been in prison ever since. His crimes have been documented in the international media, as well. In police reports, Reddy was described as a psychopath with necrophilia tendencies.
At the age of 13, Subbaiah’s son Suresh told a Bengaluru trial court about the evening of his mother’s murder. The court was told that, when he returned home from playing outside, he saw a man who introduced himself as ‘Venkatesh Uncle’ leaving the house while his mother lay dead on the floor. Reddy was sentenced to death by the trial court on the basis of Suresh’s deposition.
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