| Thursday , July 30 , 2015 |
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150730/jsp/frontpage/story_34459.jsp#.VbmA-vOqqko
Death knell sounds- Yakub fate hinges on SC graveyard shift | |
| Our Bureau | |
 Yakub Memon The midnight oil boiled hours after President Pranab Mukherjee, on the advice of the Centre, rejected a last-ditch mercy petition by Yakub. By then, the Supreme Court had dismissed Yakub’s earlier petition against a warrant that fixed his execution at 7am on his 53rd birthday tomorrow in Nagpur. At night, Yakub’s lawyers rushed to Chief Justice H.L. Dattu’s home with a plea to request the President not to take in haste a decision on the mercy petition filed during the day. Yakub’s lawyers then filed a petition with the chief justice, pleading for a 14-day stay on the execution. Around midnight, the chief justice sent the petition — through Supreme Court registry officials who were called to his house — to the residence of Justice Dipak Misra, who headed the three-judge bench that had rejected Yakub’s petition during the day. Justice Misra is expected to consult the two other fellow-judges on the bench, Justices P.C. Pant and Amitava Roy, and take a decision. Sources said the judges would start discussing the matter around 3.00am. Lawyers and the attorney general reached the court around 2.30am. Rajnath, carrying the government recommendation rejecting the plea, was at Rashtrapati Bhavan from 8.20pm to 10.45pm. An official claimed that the long discussion was intended to convey a message that the mercy plea was thoroughly examined before rejecting it. “This (the rejection) was the opinion of the government,” the official said, adding that solicitor-general Ranjit Kumar was privy to the discussions. Soon after the Supreme Court dismissed Yakub’s petition against the death warrant (issued by the court where the case originated to set in motion the process of execution), Maharashtra governor Vidyasagar Rao rejected his mercy plea. The mercy plea filed with the President was the second one related to Yakub but the first directly attributed to the convict. The earlier one, which had already been rejected, had been filed by Yakub’s brother. Today, the President forwarded the new petition to the home ministry. After consultations with law secretary P.K. Malhotra and home secretary L.C. Goyal, Rajnath went to Rashtrapati Bhavan to convey the government’s opinion. As the discussions continued into the night at Rashtrapati Bhavan, small groups of protesters gathered at Jantar Mantar Road, 2km away. The protesters included students, lawyers and activists. Mihira Sood, assistant professor of law at Jindal Global Law School, said: “The circumstances have changed since the President rejected Memon’s plea last year, as B. Raman’s letter shows that Memon had come to cooperate with the investigators.” A website last week released a 2007 article by RAW official Raman, who coordinated Yakub’s arrest in 1994, saying the prosecution had failed to highlight mitigating circumstances in its eagerness to secure the death penalty. Raman has since died. The Bombay blasts had killed 257 people on March 12, 1993. “We welcome the verdict as we were waiting for it for the last 22 years. We feel secure because of the government and we are now hopeful that the main conspirators — Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon — will also be brought to book,” said Tushar Deshmukh, who lost his mother in the blasts. After a five-hour hearing, the three-judge bench headed by Justice Misra dismissed Yakub’s writ petition challenging the death warrant issued by the special Tada court on April 30. Yakub’s lawyers had contended that the death warrant was illegal and unconstitutional as it was issued when his curative petition was pending before the apex court. A new dimension was added yesterday by one of the Supreme Court judges, Justice Kurian Joseph, who felt that the curative bench which had dismissed Yakub’s plea was improperly constituted. Rejecting both contentions, the bench today said Yakub had exhausted all his legal remedies like appeal, two review petitions and mercy petition before the President. As such, he cannot complain that the death warrant was issued in haste by the Tada court, the bench concluded. The bench also overruled the dissenting view of Justice Kurian Joseph that the curative bench was improperly constituted. There was no infirmity in the composition of the curative bench headed by the Chief Justice of India and two senior-most judges, the bench said. The bench said the principles laid down by the apex court in May this year in the Shabnam vs State of UP case that execution can be carried out only after exhausting all remedies had been fully complied with in this case. |