New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that the Tamil Nadu government cannot release former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's killers without Centre's consent.
The apex court said that States do not have suo motu power to grant remission to convicts under CrPC provisions.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice HL Dattu, who would be demittimg office on Wednesday, pronounced the judgement while staying the state government's decision to set free seven convicts in the sensational case.
The bench, also comprising justices FMI Kalifulla, Pinaki Chandra Ghosh, Abhay Manohar Sapre and UU Lalit, had reserved the judgement on August 12 after hearing for eleven days the arguments advanced by Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, who appeared for the Centre, and others including senior advocates Ram Jethmalani and Rakesh Dwivedi, representing V Sriharan alias Murugan, one of the seven convicts, and Tamil Nadu government respectively.
During the hearing, Centre had said that repeated mercy pleas before the President and the Governor by convicts seeking remission or commutation of their sentences violated the principle of finality.
It had also asserted that the killers of Rajiv Gandhi did nor deserve any mercy as the assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving foreign nationals.
The Tamil Nadu government, on other had, had asserted the states have power to grant remission under the law and trashed accusations that its decision to release seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case was "political and arbitrary".
The state government had wanted to know as to why Congress governments at the centre delayed the decision on their mercy pleas that led to commutation of their death sentence in the first place.
Jethmalani, appearing for one of the convicts, had sought dismissal of Centre's plea, contending that the citizens could file writ petitions for enforcement of their fundamental rights and "Union of India is not a citizen but State under Article 12; it has no such rights vested in it".
The apex court had on February 20,2014 stayed the state government's decision to release three convicts - Murugan, Santhan and Arivu, whose death sentence had been commuted to life term by it two days before.
It had later also stayed the release of four other convicts -- Nalini, Robert Pious, Jayakumar and Ravichandran, saying there were procedural lapses on part of the state government.
Santhan, Murugan and Arivu are currently lodged in the Central Prison, Vellore. The other four are also undergoing life sentence for their role in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination on May 21, 1991 in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.
(With additional information from PTI)
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