Patna: The Supreme Court will on Monday hear a petition against the premature release of former MP Anand Mohan, who has been convicted in the murder of then Gopalganj District Magistrate G Krishnaiah. The petition has been filed by the slain IAS officer's wife Uma Devi on Apr. 29. The petition was filed two days after the Nitish Kumar led Bihar government prematurely released Mohan from Saharsa Jail along with 26 other prisoners after tweaking the prison rules in this regard.
The SC had on May 1 listed the plea for today. Anand Mohan was in 2007 given a death sentence by a local court in Bihar. However, a year later, the Patna High Court commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Anand Mohan was convicted in the murder of Gopalganj District Magistrate and IAS officer from Telangana, G Krishnaiah who was lynched by a mob near Bihar's Muzaffarpur district in 1994 allegedly at the behest of Anand Mohan.
In her petition, Uma Devi questioned how the murder convict could be released prematurely while citing the Bihar jail rules. Devi said that as per the Bihar Jail Rules (2012) 481(1)(c), the convicts whose death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment, shall be sentenced to 20 years. Devi further argued that the sentence of life imprisonment awarded to Anand Mohan meant incarceration for his entire natural course of life and questioned how the convict could be released prematurely.
Uma, in her petition, said that the “well-settled principle of law that Imprisonment for life means full natural course of Life and cannot be mechanically interpreted to be 14 years”. It can be recalled that the Nitish Kumar led Bihar government changed the jail manual on Apr. 10 amending the clause related to the murder of a civil servant.
