New Delhi, Aug. 11: A court today sentenced to death two cab drivers for raping and murdering a 59-year-old “defenceless” Australian “old enough to be a motherly figure”.

Jyotish Prasad, 28, and Ashish Kumar, in his 30s, drove Dawn Emilie Griggs, a teacher and writer, to a deserted place near the airport, where she had landed on March 17, 2004, and tried to rape her. They killed her in panic when she put up a fight, the prosecution said. She had arrived to join a meditation course.

“I award death sentence to both the convicts under Section 302 (murder) of the IPC. Both the convicts be hanged till death,” additional sessions judge at the Patiala House courts, Vinod Kumar, said. The packed courtroom had a fair sprinkling of the foreign press.

The judge likened the case to the Supreme Court judgment against Dhananjoy Chatterjee, the Calcutta watchman executed on August 14, 2004, for raping and killing a minor girl in March 1990.

“If the facts are seen closely, it would be found that the gravity of (the) present case is more than the case (that of Chatterjee) before the Supreme Court,” the trial judge observed.

“The victim (Griggs) was of such an age she should have been seen by the convicts as a motherly figure. Committing rape of an old lady shows a mind more depraved than Chatterjee’s,” the judge said in his 17-page order.

The judge said the victim was a foreigner “totally defenceless and unprotected”. The duo, also fined Rs 3,000 each, had been found guilty on August 2. The men from Bihar couldn’t afford a lawyer and had to be defended by a court-appointed counsel.

Their brutality also weighed heavily on the judge’s decision: Prasad and Kumar had gagged, throttled and raped Griggs before killing her. They had gouged out her eyes with a screwdriver from the taxi’s toolbox and smashed her face.

The defence lawyer had pleaded for leniency, saying there were no witnesses and the case was based completely on circumstantial evidence.

The prosecution had demanded strict punishment, saying the crime was a “stigma” on a country that treats “guests as gods”.