SC faults Abu Salem's maths, junks release plea
The Indian Supreme Court ruled that gangster Abu Salem cannot count his undertrial incarceration period twice to reduce his total sentence across two separate terror cases. The court clarified that concurrent sentences do not allow for double-counting of time served for the purpose of early release.
Why it matters
This ruling sets a legal precedent for how concurrent sentences are calculated in India, impacting the interpretation of sovereign assurances and judicial sentencing.
NEW DELHI: Supreme Court has ruled that if a person is convicted in two cases and sentenced separately, the period of imprisonment undergone as an undertrial can be offset against only one of the sentences and not both even when the trial court had ordered the two sentences to run concurrently.The ruling was given by a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta while detecting that gangster Abu Salem, who was extradited from Portugal in Nov 2005 on a solemn assurance by Indian govt that he would not be awarded death penalty or a jail term of more than 25 years, had computed his undertrial incarceration period twice to seek release from jail on the ground that he has already spent 25 years in jail, even though he was awarded life sentences in two terror cases in 2015 and 2017.Justice Nath said, "The fact that sentences imposed in the…
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