Gokulraj murder case: Madras HC upholds conviction by trial court

The Madras High Court on Friday upheld the conviction and life sentence awarded to eight people in connection with the murder of a Scheduled Caste engineering student Gokulraj in 2015 in Tamil Nadu's Tiruchengode (Namakkal district), on suspicion that he was in a relationship with an upper caste woman.

The court altered the charges against two others accused in the crime to imprisonment for five years.

Ten people, against whom the Madurai special sessions court handed out the life imprisonment till death without remission sentence in March 2022, appealed against the judgment.

A division bench comprising justices M S Ramesh and N Anand Venkatesh dismissed their appeals today and confirmed the earlier verdict in the case.

The bench said it found no perversity in the trial court's judgment convicting the accused. "We remained conscious of the fact that moral conviction has no place in criminal jurisprudence," the bench said.

In order to arrive at a conclusion, the court examined several issues including the series of events, Gokulraj's visit to a temple with the woman he was allegedly in a relationship with, Gokulraj's severed body that was recovered, the motive behind the crime, prime accused Yuvaraj's conduct after the incident besides scientific evidence produced in the case.

Yuvraj is the founder of Dheeran Chinnamalai Gounder Peravai.

Gokulraj went missing on June 23, 2015 and was last seen with his woman friend near a temple in Tiruchengode. Later, his headless body was found near the railway track in Namakkal. The police initially registered the case as suspicious death and later altered it to murder.

"The post-mortem report stated that it was not a suicide but a cold-blooded murder and a culpable homicide," claimed former special public prosecutor Bhavani B Mohan, who appeared for the state.

He said even the CCTV footage turned out as evidence against those accused in the crime.