New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that killers of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi will stay in jail, overruling the decision of Tamil Nadu government to release the convicts of the high profile assassination case.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice HL Dattu said that Tamil Nadu govt cannot grant remission to convicts in the sensational assassination case without concurrence of Centre.
The apex court held that Centre will have primacy in granting remission to convicts in cases registered under central law and probed by central agencies like CBI.
The bench, also comprising justices FMI Kalifulla, Pinaki Chandra Ghosh, Abhay Manohar Sapre and UU Lalit, had reserved the judgement on 12 August after hearing for eleven days the arguments advanced by Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, who appeared for the Centre, and others including senior advocates Ram Jethmalani and Rakesh Dwivedi, representing V Sriharan alias Murugan, one of the seven convicts, and Tamil Nadu government respectively.
During the hearing, Centre had said that repeated mercy pleas before the President and the Governor by convicts seeking remission or commutation of their sentences violated the principle of finality. It had also asserted that the killers of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi did nor deserve any mercy as the assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving foreign nationals.
The Tamil Nadu government, on other had, had asserted the states have power to grant remission under the law and trashed accusations that its decision to release seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case was "political and arbitrary".
The state government had wanted to know as to why Congress governments at the centre delayed the decision on their mercy pleas that led to commutation of their death sentence in the first place.
Jethmalani, appearing for one of the convicts, had sought dismissal of Centre's plea, contending that the citizens could file writ petitions for enforcement of their fundamental rights and "Union of India is not a citizen but State under Article 12; it has no such rights vested in it". The apex court had on 20 February last year stayed the state government's decision to release three convicts - Murugan, Santhan and Arivu, whose death sentence had been commuted to life term by it two days before.
It had later also stayed the release of four other convicts -- Nalini, Robert Pious, Jayakumar and Ravichandran, saying there were procedural lapses on part of the state government.
Santhan, Murugan and Arivu are currently lodged in the Central Prison, Vellore. The other four are also undergoing life sentence for their role in Gandhi's assassination on 21 May, 1991 in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.
