While balancing the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, the following have been viewed as aggravating circumstances: i. That the appellant has committed murder of three persons. ii. That the appellant knew what he was doing and the conseiii. quences thereof and yet he committed the offence. That the murder of Ratna Bai was committed as he was previously charged of rape with the deceased Ratna and detained in iv. jail for a year although he was later acquitted. Apart from committing murder of three persons, he has also v. caused grievous injuries to three persons. That two of the deceased and one of the injured persons were women. The only mitigating circumstance that the Court took note of was the fact that the appellant had been previously accused of committing rape and was detained in jail for one year only to be acquitted later. Another factor that the High Court placed reliance on was that the appellant either feigned ignorance to or denied the questions put to him by the Trial Judge. The Court thus drew the inference that he did not make a case that the offence was committed by him in an emotional or highly disturbed state of mind owing to false implication in the rape case. The Court held that “the appellant did not mitigate the circumstance for not imposing the death sentence.” In conclusion, the High Court held that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances and the case thus fell within the ambit of rarest of the rare case which calls for the imposition of death penalty. 3 Having regard to the strong