HC raps Shiela govt on parole procedures

NEW DELHI: The Delhi government once again faced the high court’s anger for granting parole to Manu Sharma, sentenced to a life term for the murder of Jessica Lall. “By and large, from your attitude, the impression is quite clear that only convicts who have connections will be able to get parole easily,” a division bench told the state counsel.

The bench of Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah and Justice S Muralidhar castigated the state government for its casual approach towards granting of parole and asked if Sharma had been scrutinised like any other convict.

“Is this the way genuineness of the grounds are being verified? If this trend will continue, poor and weaker prisoners will never get parole. Your lax attitude is responsible for increasing the pendency,” the bench told state counsel Meera Bhatia.

The bench asked Lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna to look into the matter and amend guidelines and submit a detailed report by the next hearing on December 9.

The high court had slammed the Shiela Dikshit government last week for the way in which parole was granted to Manu Sharma accusing it of giving ‘selective treatment’. His parole application was cleared within 20 days as against six months in most cases.

The court had said the report depicted a “dismal picture clearly stating that the government is giving least priority to parole applications of convicts”. It also said that it seemed only influential people with high connections get out of jail easily. The court was hearing a the complaint of a convict Sumedh Singh on his parole application pending for over three months.

Sharma’s parole hit headlines earlier this month after he was found in a Delhi nightclub. He had sought parole on grounds of the illness of his mother, who was in Chandigarh. An embarrassed Delhi government claimed that it had observed all procedures in granting parole to Sharma, the son of a Haryana politician and a trusted aide of chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.