New Delhi: “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future,” the Delhi High Court said Monday, recalling the late Supreme Court judge Justice Krishna Iyer’s words and allowing the premature release of a man incarcerated for more than 22 years.
Acting on Rajab Ali’s petition for premature release, the court said that the man’s future, along with his conduct in jail, needed to be considered, and that it reflected a complete transformation and “willingness to be a changed person”.
The man is a life convict in a 2003 rape case involving a three-and-a-half-year-old child. He was 22 when he committed the crime. The Delhi High Court, in 2010, upheld his 2005 trial court sentence.
By ordering his premature release, the high court has set aside the 2024 decision of the Sentence Review Board (SRB) that turned down his plea for premature release. The SRB is tasked with examining cases for premature release in line with Centre-issued guidelines.
Between 2016 and 2024, he filed 10 applications, requesting the SRB to release him, but each time the board rejected his representation, citing the gravity of the offence.
This time, the Delhi HC, in its order, held that the gravity of the offence could not be the sole reason to reject his plea and that drawing a distinction between classes of life convicts on the basis of the nature of the crime was unconstitutional.
“Balancing the individual and societal welfare, it is a fit case where the petitioner is held entitled to remission and is directed to be released,” the high court ruled.
It stated that the convict’s continued incarceration based on the nature of his crimes, “defeats the entire substratum of reformative theories, tight custom and poses a threat of overlooking the reformative potential”.
Advocate Vrinda Bhandari, who appeared for the convict, labelled the judgment as an “important milestone in the jurisprudence of premature release and remissions”.
The judgment, she said, recognised the important principle that the gravity of an offence could not be the sole ground for rejecting a plea for premature release.
She said the Delhi HC, in its present ruling, took into consideration the convict’s conduct, his work in the semi-open prison, and his multiple releases on parole, before ruling that he was entitled to remission.
She said the court’s ruling was also significant because it recognised that when the SRB repeatedly rejected a convict’s case for premature release, sending the plea back to the board was “an exercise in futility”.
The court pointed to Rajab Ali’s “exemplary and reformed” behaviour within jail, and his strict adherence to law during his interim bail, parole, and furlough.
“He has never indulged in any notorious activity. His conduct during the periods of release, outside the prison, reinforces his commitment to rehabilitation and lawful reintegration into society,” it said.
By ignoring such crucial aspects, the SRB acted arbitrarily, rendering its decision unreasonable and unjust, the high court’s 6 April judgment said.
The court noted that the SRB, by rejecting the man’s plea for premature release ten times, had acted in an “arbitrary” and “irrational” manner, contrary to the Remission Policy, 2004, and DRP Rules, 2018.
Rajab Ali sought premature release on the grounds of the law’s misapplication. He also argued that the Delhi Prison Rules, 2018—which were notified—should have been considered while assessing his case for premature release.
Rule 1253 of the DPR Rules states that all convicted male prisoners serving life sentences are eligible for consideration for premature release after serving at least 10 years without any remission. The only exception to this can be prisoners sentenced to life for offences punishable by death, or those whose death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.
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How the case reached Delhi HC
The man was arrested in January 2003 for allegedly raping a 3.5-year-old child, following which a Delhi Court convicted him under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code in December 2005, and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
In January 2010, when he challenged his conviction, the plea was rejected by the Delhi HC, and his sentence was upheld.
Six years later, the SRB considered his case for the first time in January 2016, given that he had met some of the conditions for premature release. Despite this, the SRB rejected Ali’s premature release owing to the “nature and gravity of the offence” coupled with the threat to the victim’s family.
Usually, when considering pleas for the premature release of convicts, SRBs consider a host of factors, including the circumstances under which the crime happened, the probability of it happening again, and the socio-economic condition of the convict’s family.
In Ali’s case, they cited factors, such as heinousness, manner, gravity, and perversity of the crime, along with the convict’s age and strong opposition to his release by the police.
After facing the tenth round of rejection from the SRB in 2024, Ali finally approached the Delhi HC.
Ali’s conduct in prison & his case
Pointing to his good conduct in prison, Ali said he was awarded a yoga training certificate in Tihar Jail in June 2018.
In 2017, he was moved to a semi-open jail in Tihar, besides having been released on parole a total of three times and granted furlough 22 times.
Moreover, in 2020—during the COVID-19 pandemic—he was released on emergency parole and worked as a rickshaw driver before his surrender. His return to prison, the plea stressed, showed his commitment to lawfully reintegrating into society.
Further, he had performed labour allotted to him with devotion and diligence—evidenced by the fact that the chief probation officer and social welfare department had recommended his premature release—the man pleaded.
Ali’s lawyers argued that his transfer to a semi-open jail demonstrated both the trust in him and his reformative progress. They contended this factor should have favoured his premature release, pointing out that it showed a “significant reduction in his propensity to commit crime”.
During the course of his incarceration, Ali, according to the plea, assumed several positions of responsibility, including but not limited to welding work, volunteering at the langar, learning yoga, cleaning, making tea, serving duties, managing prison canteens, and working at the Tihar Haat.
Pointing to the ten rejections he faced, Ali’s lawyer argued that it reflected “a mechanical and perfunctory approach”, which undermined the board’s objective.
The SRB, time and again, failed to give due weight to Ali’s exemplary conduct during his incarceration, his lawyer argued, adding that his participation in rehabilitation or training programmes, along with the certificates of recognition awarded to him, were consistently overlooked.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)