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SC bins Dara review plea

-The Telegraph

The Supreme Court has thrown out a review petition by Dara Singh, who is serving a life term for the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor sons.

“… we have carefully gone through the review petition and the connected papers. We find no merit in the review petition and the same is accordingly dismissed,” Justices P. Sathasivam and B.S. Chauhan said in their April 24 order after the review plea was heard in their chambers.

Singh had been convicted by an Odisha trial court in September 2003 and handed the death penalty for burning alive Staines and his sons. On appeal, the high court had commuted the sentence to life. The Supreme Court later confirmed the life term.

In his review petition, to the same bench that confirmed his life sentence, Dara claimed he had been erroneously convicted by the trial court judge for having committed a number of offences.

Dara claimed that his alleged motive to commit the crime was that Staines was engaged in converting the local tribal population into Christianity. This allegedly made him angry, his review plea said.

“The existence of such a motive was the bedrock prosecution case, in furtherance of which they successfully built upon a fabricated storyof conspiracy and guilt. The sessions judge too accepted the prosecution’s version as to the existence of this motive and convicted the petitioner,” he said.

The high court set aside the lower court’s order on May 19, 2005, and modified the death sentence to life.

The top court affirmed this high court judgment on January 21, 2011. But in an unprecedented order on January 25, 2011, the top court altered the judgment without notice to the parties concerned and deleted the reference to the motive, that is conversion activities of the murdered missionary.

The top court did not assign any reason for the alteration.

Dara, who in a recent petition claimed he had been convicted because the media made him a “cause céèbre”, said such alteration without notice to the parties concerned amounted to gross disregard of provisions of the CrPC, 1973, Supreme Court rules, 1966, and all settled notions of justice.

He also claimed that the allegation of conspiracy against him was unsubstantiated by the prosecution. The evidence by the CBI was concocted, he claimed, adding that confessions were procured under duress.