[ad_1]
New Delhi: The Supreme Court dismissed a petition by two of the 11 convicts in the Bilkis Bano case on Friday, which challenged the verdict from January 8 that cancelled their remission.
“What is this petition? How can it be maintained? It is misconceived. How can an Article 32 petition be filed? We cannot sit in appeal over an order passed by another bench,” stated a bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Sanjay Kumar. The bench permitted Rishi Malhotra to withdraw the petition.
Meanwhile, convict Bhagwandas Shah applied for interim bail. In March, Bhagwandas and Soni approached the Supreme Court, asserting that the January 8 verdict cancelling their sentence’s remission contradicted a 2002 constitutional bench order, and requested that the matter be referred to a larger bench for a definitive decision.
The two convicts, detained in Godhra sub-jail, claimed that an anomalous situation had emerged where two different coordinate benches had given opposing views on the same issue of premature release and on which state government’s policy should apply to their remission.
They argued that while one bench on May 13, 2022, explicitly directed the Gujarat government to consider Shah’s application for premature release under the state’s remission policy of July 9, 1992, the bench that delivered the verdict on January 8, 2024, determined that Maharashtra, not Gujarat, was authorized to grant remission.
The plea contended that the January 8, 2024, judgment was in direct conflict with the constitutional bench decision in Rupa Ashok Hurra’s case from 2002 and should be overturned to prevent judicial impropriety and future legal uncertainty and chaos regarding which precedent of law should be applied. It suggested that if any party is dissatisfied with a Supreme Court judgment on an issue, they would
[ad_2]
