Telangana HC rules remission is not an indefeasible right of convicts

Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court held on Saturday that remission is not an indefeasible right of convicts, and they cannot seek premature release on the sole ground that they have completed 18 years of sentence and 24 years of sentence including remission.

A division bench comprising Justice Annireddy Abhishek Reddy and Justice G. Anupama Chakravarthy gave the order on a petition filed by a woman stating that her father Sk. Zakaria, who was convicted to life imprisonment for murdering a government servant, M.A. Khadeer, deputy secretary of the then AP Wakf Board, in 2003.

She said her father had completed 18 years of the sentence, and had been in jail for 24 years. She said the authorities had not released her father and it was nothing but illegal detention. During the hearing, she asked the court to direct authorities to pay compensation for the illegal detention of her father.

She had earlier filed three petitions before the High Court seeking remission for her father. The court had not passed orders, stating that the power of remission had to be exercised by the government. The court had directed the jail superintendent to consider the case of Zakaria for remission.

In the present petition, her counsel Pushpinder Kaur said that in spite Zakaria being eligible for remission even as per GO Ms No 30 of the home department of September 26, 2020, the authorities were not passing orders for his release. This was abuse of law, counsel said.

GO 30 said that convicted male prisoners sentenced to imprisonment for life and who had undergone an actual sentence of 10 years including remand period and total sentence of 14 years including remission on October 2, 2020, shall be released.

Mujeeb Kumar Sadashivuni, special government counsel, argued that it could not be said that any convicted person serving imprisonment for life would be automatically entitled for release as soon as he completes a prison term of 14 years or 20 years. Sadashivuni submitted several citations of the Supreme Court in this regard.

Agreeing with the state’s stand, the High Court reiterated that life sentence which imposed by the trial court has to be read as the entire biological life of the convicted person. The detenu does not have any vested right to seek release automatically as soon as he completes the period of sentence of either 14 years or 20 years, as the case may be.

The court also said that the petitioner's father could not be said to be illegally detained, because he had not been granted remission so far.