murdering Leticia Mendes and her baby grandson Dylan Lobo in Borivali two years ago, get the death sentence tomorrow. Justice R. P. Malik of the Sessions Court, who has been presiding over this trial for the last year-and-half, in his wisdom pronounced the accused guilty last week Saturday. And he posted the delivery of his verdict to 11a.m. tomorrow. This is not because the learned judge wanted time to arrive at a sentence. But so that the defence lawyer Majeed Memon could prepare a case in favour of life for the accused.

The public prosecutor, that doughty fighter Rohini Salian, who acquired the conviction in the terrible crime, is pressing for the death penalty. She believes the crime was monstrous. And that the boys have to be punished for it. Only the death sentence will send a message to the youth that they can't get away with committing gruesome murders, she says.

senselessly stabbed the elderly grandmother 14 times to death in her tiny IC Colony flat at Borivali. They had gone to rob the place and she put up a struggle. The boys were then surprised by the woman's daughter, Glenda Lobo, who had come to stay with her one-and-half year old baby boy Dylan. They attacked Glenda murderously too, and left her for dead.

Had they fled the scene then, the boys might have got away with life. Though I believe any person who takes somebody else's life, ought to pay for it with their own. What the boys went on to do after killing Leticia and attacking Glenda, defeats all acts of depravity known to mankind. The baby began crying. So they strangled the little fellow to death, and not content with that, they hung his tiny body from a ceiling fan by a telephone wire. When news of the double murders broke out, Mumbai read it with a sense of disbelief. Nobody could understand why the boys had murdered an innocent and beautiful baby who had no quarrel with the world, and whose entire world was his mother and grandmother. I doubt the parents of these boys have come to terms with what they did, too.

I have seen police photographs of the scene of the crime and was shocked by the brutality of the murders. My blood ran cold at the sight of baby Dylan swinging piteously from the ceiling. My senses went numb at the amount of blood that Leticia had spilled onto her kitchen floor. I counted in horror the number of wounds on the poor grandmother's body. Her throat had been slit, she had been stabbed about the head, her ear was dangling by the skin, her lips had been slashed and were hanging apart. She must have died a slow and agonising death, and through the bloody mist of her last gasping breaths, watched helplessly what her killers were doing to her daughter and grandson.

But what about the mental scars? What about the emotional hurt she must be suffering every moment since her mother and baby were murdered two years ago? What about the fear and insecurity that have become part of her days? The nightmares that have come to haunt her nights ever since? Who is going to enthuse a sense of purpose in her empty and hopeless life now and how are they going to do it? All these are not wounds that any amount of prayer or the skill of a surgeon's scalpel can heal. But the death sentence to the boys who turned her world upside down might ease the cry for justice that has been tearing Glenda's soul and destroying her peace of mind.

Majeed Memon, who almost became a gangland killing statistic himself, argues that the death sentence is given only in the rarest of rare cases. He says that the absence of weapons on the boys, the fact that they had no criminal records, and that they were teenagers showed that the case did not demand the severest punishment. I disagree. The boys were known to the woman they murdered. Surely they were not intending to just rob her and walk away without her raising the alarm. That apart, baby Dylan's murder and his hanging sets these boys apart from ordinary criminals. They are killers. The baby was no threat to them. Yet, they killed him and strung him up from the ceiling in a chilling display of what somebody who has total disregard and lack of emotion for life can do. If a teenager's age did not come in the way of his planning and committing two cold-blooded and ruthless murders, why should it be raised when he is about to be sentenced for the crime?

Everybody I know is hoping that Justice R. P. Malik will sentence the killers of Leticia Mendes and Dylan Lobo to death tomorrow. Mumbai has not been reserved in expressing its demand for capital punishment in this case. People are thinking, if this horror had happened in their lives, if two people they loved were so senselessly and heartlessly murdered, what sentence would they want the court to give the killers?

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