On the evening of June 19, 2011, a tenant on the first floor of 24 Shrinagar Main, in Indore, told the landlord that the flat next to hers was bolted from the outside and that there were patches of blood on the door. The landlord, Vishal Pandey, looked in through an open window and saw bodies near the bedroom door. Niranjan Deshpande, a bank officer, had rented the flat only a few days earlier. His wife, Megha, forty-two, their daughter Ashlesha, twenty-one, and his mother-in-law, Rohini Phadke, seventy, were dead. They had been stabbed, and Megha had also been shot in the forehead. Ashlesha had twenty-two stab wounds.
Megha Deshpande's gold bangles and mangalsutra were gone, along with Rohini Phadke's two gold bangles and Ashlesha's mobile phone, camera and bank cards. The killings in broad daylight in a well-off colony at the center of the city drew crowds, and the Indore police came under public pressure to explain why women were not safe even there.
The official account of the breakthrough was that at about six in the morning of June 22 a Crime Branch constable on patrol noticed a young woman loitering near an ATM, that a woman constable searched her, and that she was carrying a bank card belonging to one of the dead women. She was Neha Verma, about twenty-one, of Devendra Nagar. According to the police, her statements led that same morning to the arrest of two men, Rahul, also called Govind, and Manoj, and to the recovery of jewelry, a knife and a country-made pistol. On the day of the killings Rahul had shot himself in the foot during the attack and had filed a false report at another police station claiming unknown men had shot him.
Much of the rest of the case rested on forensic evidence. Fingerprints lifted in the flat matched all three accused. The ballistics report found that the bullet taken from Megha's body and the bullet taken from Rahul's foot were fired from the pistol recovered from him. DNA analysis found Megha's blood on Rahul's clothes, Ashlesha's on Manoj's, and Megha's on Neha's sandal. A witness said he had seen two injured young men on a motorcycle near the house and a young woman on a scooter who told them to get to a doctor. Megha Deshpande had worked as a consultant for Oriflame, and a partly completed Oriflame form was among the things seized from Neha's home.
The three were convicted on December 13, 2013, by the First Additional Sessions Judge at Indore of murder on three counts, robbery with a deadly weapon and house-trespass, and all three were sentenced to death as a rarest-of-the-rare case. Neha Verma was twenty-three. Press reports at the time described it as the first death sentence that court had passed on a woman. The Madhya Pradesh High Court confirmed the sentences on September 29, 2014.
When the appeals reached the Supreme Court, a three-judge bench of Justices Uday Umesh Lalit, S. Ravindra Bhat and Bela M. Trivedi took the police story of the arrest apart. A sub-inspector, Deepika Shinde, testifying for the defense, admitted she had been at the scene on the night of the killings, had analyzed the victims' call records, and had received a tip before the arrest describing exactly where Neha would be and what she would be wearing. Police records showed that the call analysis had traced a phone in regular contact with Megha to Neha's father, and that Shinde had been recommended for an out-of-turn promotion for identifying Neha. None of this had been disclosed at trial. Neha's father testified that she had in fact been taken for questioning days before the official arrest. The court held that the prosecution's account of her arrest could not be believed and drew an adverse inference from the suppression, and it also found the recoveries of June 23 doubtful.
The court did not free them. It held that the rest of the circumstantial case, including the fingerprints, the ballistics and the recoveries witnessed on June 22, still proved the three guilty, and on May 20, 2022, it upheld the convictions and commuted all three death sentences to life imprisonment.
The judgment in Manoj and Others v. State of Madhya Pradesh is cited far beyond this case. The Court held that the sentencing hearing required by the Code of Criminal Procedure had become a formality without any system for gathering mitigating evidence, and it laid down a mandatory procedure: before a death sentence may be imposed, the State must put before the court a probation officer's report, the prisoner's jail conduct record and a psychiatric and psychological evaluation, and the defense must have a full opportunity to present the accused's social history, including family background, education, illness, disability and trauma. Trial judges were told to seek out that material rather than wait for it to be offered. Indian practice now speaks of the Manoj guidelines, later benches have applied them, and in 2022 the Supreme Court referred the wider question of how mitigating circumstances are to be heard in capital cases to a Constitution Bench.