A four-year delay by the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in Madhya Pradesh to forward the mercy petition of a man who killed his wife and five children to the Centre has helped him escape the noose.
The Supreme Court held that there is no doubt that the man killed his own family. Not only did the State government delay forwarding his mercy plea, it did not, for four whole years, file an affidavit in the apex court to explain the lapse.
A three-judge Bench of Justices N.V. Ramana, Deepak Gupta and Indira Banerjee concluded that the delay on the part of the State government was “undue, inordinate and unreasonable” and commuted the death penalty of the convict, Jagdish, to life imprisonment in a recent judgment (February 21).
“The delay in forwarding the petition is totally un-explained and this court cannot countenance an unexplained delay of more than four years. We are dealing here with the case of a person who has been sentenced to death. The mercy petition is the last hope of a person on death row. Every dawn will give rise to a new hope that his mercy petition may be accepted. By night fall this hope also dies,” Justice Gupta wrote for the Bench.
The court observed that an inordinate and unexplained delay in deciding a mercy petition and the consequent delay in execution of the death sentence for years on end is another form of punishment,” the Supreme Court concluded.
The crime was committed in August 2005. The trial was finished the next year. The Madhya Pradesh High Court also confirmed the guilt of the convict and death sentence. The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal filed by Jagdish in 2009. He filed his mercy petition to the President and State Governor in October 2009. The State authorities forwarded the petition after more than four years in October 2013. The mercy plea was finally rejected by the President in July 2014.