The roster carries her as Neah Verma. Her name is Neha Verma, and this entry uses it.
She was born around 1990 and worked as a beautician in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. She approached Megha Deshpande at the family's rented rooms in Shrinagar Colony asking for work, was befriended, and was admitted to the house on that basis.
On June 19, 2011 she returned with two men, Rahul Choudhary and Manoj Atodh, and the three of them killed the three women living there: Megha Deshpande, forty-two; her daughter Ashlesha, twenty-one; and her mother Rohini Phadke, seventy. They were shot and stabbed. The house was robbed of cash, jewellery and two bank cards. The motive was robbery and nothing else was suggested at trial.
She was arrested on June 22, 2011 after a constable on patrol saw her at a cash machine and found she was carrying Ashlesha Deshpande's card. Her statement led the police to the two men and to the recovered property, the knife and the pistol.
All three were convicted of murder, dacoity and trespass and sentenced to death on December 13, 2013 by the First Additional Sessions Judge at Indore, who called the crime rarest of the rare. She was twenty-three. It was the first death sentence passed on a woman by that court and the first time it had condemned three people in one case. The Madhya Pradesh High Court confirmed the sentences on September 29, 2014.
The Supreme Court heard the appeals and gave judgment on May 20, 2022, in Manoj and Others v. State of Madhya Pradesh. It upheld the convictions and commuted all three death sentences to life imprisonment.
That judgment is why this case matters well beyond itself. The Court held that the sentencing safeguard in the Code of Criminal Procedure had become meaningless in the absence of any framework for gathering mitigating material, and it laid down a mandatory procedure: before a death sentence is imposed, the State must place before the court a probation officer's report, a jail conduct and prison report, and a psychiatric and psychological evaluation, and the defence must have a full opportunity to put in social history material: family background, education, illness, disability, trauma. Trial judges were told to be proactive rather than waiting for such evidence to be offered.
The requirements are now referred to in Indian practice as the Manoj protocol. Later judgments have applied it, the Supreme Court has held that ignoring it can justify reopening a concluded sentence, and the deficiencies the Court acknowledged in Manoj led it to refer the whole question of mitigating circumstances in capital cases to a Constitution Bench, where it remains pending.
So the entry that stood here saying her sentence was unknown had it backwards: her appeal is one of the most cited death penalty decisions in the country. Indian appellate courts set aside the great majority of death sentences imposed at trial, and this is the case in which the Court set out what a trial court must do before imposing one.