New Delhi: A bench led by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on Monday agreed to hear on May 8, the petition filed by the wife of slain IAS officer G. Krishnaiah against the premature release of former Bihar MP Anand Mohan, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the officer.
The petition was mentioned for urgent listing by counsel appearing for Uma Krishnaiah, wife of then Gopalganj district magistrate Krishnaiah, a Telangana-origin Dalit officer. The gangster-turned-politician was released on April 27, following a tweak in prison rules because of which Mohan became eligible to apply for remission.
The pre-amended rules forbade, among other things, the early release of a convict who had been found guilty of murdering a public servant on duty, before he actually undergoes imprisonment for 20 years including remissions.
The plea argued that the state of Bihar had specially brought about an amendment to the Bihar Prison Manual 2012 with retrospective effect to extend benefit of remission to the convict for political gain.
“The said amendment dated 10.04.2023 is… against the public policy and has resulted in demoralisation of the Civil Servants in the State Therefore, it suffers from the vice of malafide and is manifestly arbitrarily and is contrary to the idea of a welfare state,” it said.
Mohan was awarded death sentence by the trial court, which on appeal was commuted to ‘rigorous Imprisonment for life’ by the Patna high court in 2008.
“Life imprisonment, when awarded as a substitute for death penalty, has to be carried out strictly as directed by the court and would be beyond application of remission,” Uma Krishnaiah said in her petition before the Supreme Court.
Krishnaiah, who hailed from Telangana, was beaten to death by a mob in 1994 when his vehicle tried to overtake the funeral procession of gangster Chhotan Shukla in Muzaffarpur district. Mohan, then an MLA, was leading the procession.
