What Was Laadli’s Fault?’ A Punjab Court Asked. Then It Answered.

North Desk Correspondent

Ludhiana Child Rape Murder: Punjab-Haryana High Court Commutes Death Sentence, Orders 50 Years Without Remission

In commuting a death sentence, two judges did something rare — they asked not just what punishment Sonu Singh deserved, but what kind of society produces men like him.

Chandigarh, March 20 — She was four years and seven months old. She was playing near her grandfather’s (nana) tea stall in Daba, Ludhiana, on the morning of December 28, 2023, when a man she knew came by, bought her a chocolate for ten rupees, and took her away in his arms.

Her body was found that evening, hidden in a bed-box in the house across the street. She had been raped and strangled.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court, in a judgment pronounced this week, called her Laadli — the beloved one. It is a name the court chose itself, to protect her identity and to honour her. She had no other name in these proceedings. She needed none.

Her killer, Sonu Singh, 28, a labourer from Uttar Pradesh visiting a cousin in the neighbourhood, was sentenced to death by a Ludhiana sessions court in March 2025. On Thursday, Justices Anoop Chitkara and Sukhvinder Kaur kept him alive — but ruled that he will not walk free until he has spent 50 years behind bars, not counting remissions. He was 28 when he killed her. He will be at least 78 before the question of his release can even arise.

What the Evidence Showed

The case against Sonu Singh was built on circumstance and science, and it held.

His mobile tower data placed him at the crime scene from 9 AM to 12:15 PM on the day of the killing. At 1:44 PM, his phone was near Ludhiana railway station. By 7:08 PM, he was in Haryana. He had fled — and would not be found for three weeks, arrested in his home village in Fatehpur, UP, wearing a black mask when police spotted him at the village square.

The DNA report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Chandigarh was conclusive: Sonu Singh’s genetic material was found on Laadli’s vaginal swabs, her clothing, and her sandal. The chain of custody was intact. The seals were unbroken.

He offered no explanation in court. He led no defence evidence. He denied everything — including the DNA report — and said nothing more.

The court found the chain of circumstances complete and unbroken. The conviction was upheld on all counts.

Why He Was Not Hanged

The court described the case as sitting on what it called a razor’s edge — the line that separates the rarest of rare from what falls just short of it.

Three things tipped the balance away from the gallows.

The investigation had failed. The CCTV footage, which should have been seized from the DVR as a complete video file, was instead recorded on a mobile phone pointed at a screen — so degraded that the court could place no reliance on it whatsoever. One of Laadli’s sandals was never recovered, though photographs showed she was wearing both. The FIR was registered nearly six hours after her body was found, two kilometres from the police station. A key witness — the man whose house was the crime scene, who could have placed Sonu Singh there definitively — was never examined by police.

Then there was the fabricated witness. The police had produced a man named Sandeep Kumar Shukla, who claimed Sonu Singh had walked into his office and confessed the crime to him on the afternoon of the murder. The court dismantled this testimony paragraph by paragraph, and reached a conclusion it did not soften: the investigator had introduced this witness to fabricate evidence of an extrajudicial confession. It is one of the most damning findings in the judgment — and it changed nothing about the guilt of the accused, but it changed the calculus of an irreversible sentence.

Finally, the court found that the murder was most likely an act of panic — committed to destroy the evidence of rape — rather than a premeditated killing. The distinction mattered. Brutality, the bench held, had not crossed into calculation.

Fifty Years

The sentence of fifty years without remission has no direct precedent in Indian courts for this category of offence.

The Supreme Court has, in similar cases of child rape and murder, specified minimum terms of 25, 30 and 35 years. This court went further — reasoning that for a man who raped and murdered a child under five years of age, the only way to protect other children and women, short of execution, was to keep him imprisoned well beyond what the bench called the prime age of virility.

The fine was set at Rs 75 lakh in total — Rs 25 lakh for the rape conviction under POCSO and Rs 50 lakh for the murder. Every rupee recovered, the court directed, is to be paid to Laadli’s parents and siblings in equal shares.

The Question Nobody Had to Ask

Near the end of a 63-page judgment dense with precedent and legal reasoning, the two judges paused and asked a question the law did not require them to ask.

What was Laadli’s fault?

They answered it themselves. Her only fault, they wrote, was that she was born female. And that was just a coincidence.

The court wrote that somewhere between teaching and learning — in classrooms and in the daily texture of family and community — society had failed to teach basic respect for life, for the dignity of other human beings, for the simple understanding of what it means to live as a civilised person. In the perverted sight of the accused, shaped by this failure, Laadli had been reduced to an object.

These are not the words of a routine judgment. They are the words of a court in pain.

The Last Morning

The court recorded one detail that no legal argument required.

The chocolate, it noted, was used as bait. It could not be ruled out that Laadli had finished it on the way. The wrapper was never found. She could never have known, the judges wrote, that the chocolate would be so bitter.

Her grandfather had trusted Sonu Singh the way people from close village backgrounds trust one another — without question, without suspicion. The court said it understood why an old man, in his grief and guilt, might later claim he had tried to stop the accused when the record showed he had not. The guilt of having let her go, the bench said, would be unbearable.

The case is closed. The conviction stands on all counts.

Laadli was four years and seven months old. She had finished her chocolate and was going to play.

North Desk tracks courts, crime and justice across Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh. Write to us at editor@northdesk.in