Hyderabad: In a landmark ruling, the Telangana High Court on Friday, January 23, quashed the death sentence awarded to a mother from Suryapet district who killed her seven-month-old daughter, citing the long-term mental illness that left her unaware of her actions.
Bhanothu Bharati was convicted by the Suryapet district court in April 2025 for the gruesome murder of her daughter, Elias Lasya Elias, on April 15, 2021, in Mekalapati Thanda of Mote Mandal. Afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, Bharati believed slitting the infant’s throat and removing her tongue would ward off a “serpent curse.”
HC sets aside lower court’s order
The lower court had imposed capital punishment, but the High Court bench of Justice K Lakshman and Justice Vakiti Ramakrishna Reddy set it aside after reviewing appeals from both sides.
The court noted significant lapses in the trial, including discrepancies in witness statements from Bharati’s husband and brother-in-law, failure to record her uncle’s testimony, and the husband’s retraction of earlier evidence.
It highlighted Bharati’s troubled history: forced into an initial marriage despite loving a classmate, later divorcing and remarrying him; rituals performed for her alleged “serpent curse”; and intermittent mental health treatment she abandoned before her second marriage.
Clear evidence showed chronic mental illness, worsened by postpartum weakness when medical stress peaks, with Bharati delusionally claiming her baby “looked like a snake.”
The lower court overlooked medical reports and proceeded without psychiatric input, prompting the High Court to commission its own expert evaluation. This confirmed Bharati’s ongoing schizophrenia with no prior criminal history.
Emphasising that death penalties apply only in “rarest of rare” cases, the bench acquitted her but deemed release into society dangerous due to her past behaviour.
Instead, it ordered her lifelong confinement and treatment at Hyderabad’s Erragadda Mental Hospital.
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