The Punjab and Haryana high court has commuted death sentence, awarded to four men, to 30-year-jail and acquitted one woman in the January 2023 murder of a Kurukshetra woman doctor.
The victim, Dr Vanita Arora, stayed with her husband and in-laws on the first floor, while the ground floor housed their clinic in Thanesar area of the district. He rushed to her but was waylaid by two men who put a pistol to his head and took him to the drawing room. They began asking him for money and jewellery. He somehow managed to escape, and jumped into the adjacent school’s building and alerted his neighbours, who called the police. Once the police arrived, Dr Arora went upstairs only to find his wife lying dead and the jewellery missing. During the course of investigation, the role of the couple’s former maid, Poonam, was established. She was subsequently arrested along with her aides. Now, Poonam, awarded death sentence, has been acquitted by high court. Four others included Sunil Kumar, Manish Kumar, Vikramjeet alias Bittu and Vikram alias Vicky.
Her husband, Dr Atul Arora, told police that around 9.20 pm on January 9, 2023, he was in his parents’ room when he heard his wife scream. Dr Arora took out approximately ₹ 1 lakh and gave it to them. In December 2025, the court of additional district and sessions judge held the five persons guilty and awarded them death penalty under Section 302 (murder) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and awarded death sentence.
After that, he said, he heard no further voices from his wife. It further recorded that it cannot be said with certainty that the accused are beyond reform or incapable of returning to the fold of society. “At the same time, this court cannot be oblivious to the adverse circumstances: a woman was done to death within the sanctity of her home, in pursuance of a conspiracy hatched with deliberation, and some of the accused carry a long history of involvement in other criminal cases,”
A sentence that gives every morning for decades to reflect and repent is no mean sentence,” it said adding that while a family has lost one of its own, the law need not extinguish the lives of the convicts to vindicate that loss; it must instead ensure that they spend the prime of their lives in confinement, answerable for the crime, with the door of reform left ajar, but not of release. “These aggravating features rule out any leniency that would belittle the loss suffered. We also ponder whether the true measure of a sentence lies in how swiftly it ends a life or in how long it compels a person to live with what he has done.
