Orissa HC reserves order on Sethy ‘double jeopardy’ plea

CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court has fixed December 5 deadline for the State and CBI counsels to file their written note of submission on Artha Tatwa (AT) group chief Pradeep Sethy’s plea alleging ‘illegal detention’.Sethy had filed the petition for release from jail claiming ‘double jeopardy’ as he has already completed seven years sentence ordered by Chief Judicial Magistrate (CBI), Bhubaneswar on April 6, 2017.

‘Double jeopardy’ is a universally accepted principle that bars a person from being tried and convicted more than once for the same offence. The division bench of Justice Sanju Panda and Justice SK Panigrahi fixed the deadline while closing hearing and reserving judgment on Sethy’s plea on Friday. Sethy has been in jail since his arrest on May 13, 2013. He filed the petition on June 30. While senior advocate M Kanungo argued the case for Sethy, advocate J Katikia and advocate S Nayak appeared for the State government and CBI respectively.

As chronicled in the petition, Sethy was convicted for the second time for the same offence and sentenced to seven years by the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Khurda on July 3, 2017. On November 15, 2017, the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Sambalpur convicted him and sentenced him to five years imprisonment, but with a direction that the sentence shall commence after expiry of the sentence in the previous case.

It was argued on behalf of Sethy that he was given maximum sentence of seven years in the first case after he pleaded guilty to the crime of committing fraud and deceiving investors. He had accepted that AT group of companies collected more than `500 crore out of which `201 crore could not be returned to investors/depositors. He had also pleaded guilty of the same offence in two other cases.