Bilkis Yakub Rasool vs. Union of India & Ors.
Background
During the 2002 Gujarat riots that followed the Godhra train-burning incident, the petitioner, Bilkis Bano, then 21 years old and pregnant, was gang-raped, and fourteen members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter, were murdered. After a CBI-led retrial in Mumbai (transferred there by the Supreme Court itself for a fair trial), eleven convicts were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008, a conviction affirmed by the Bombay High Court in 2017 and by the Supreme Court thereafter. In August 2022, the Gujarat government granted all eleven convicts premature release/remission after roughly 14 years in custody, relying on an earlier May 2022 Supreme Court order that had directed Gujarat to consider their remission applications. Bilkis Bano and several other citizens/organisations challenged this en-masse release as illegal.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that the Gujarat government had no jurisdiction at all to decide the remission applications, because under Section 432(7) CrPC the "appropriate Government" for remission is the government of the state where the offenders were tried and convicted (here, Maharashtra (Mumbai), not Gujarat) since the trial had been transferred out of Gujarat specifically to ensure fairness. The Court further held that the earlier May 2022 order directing Gujarat to consider remission was itself a "nullity," obtained by suppressing material facts and misrepresenting them to the Court, and was also per incuriam (i.e., decided without regard to binding precedent), so it could not shield the remission orders or bind the petitioner, who was not even a party to that earlier proceeding. Independently, the Court also found the remission orders substantively unlawful because Gujarat had usurped Maharashtra's authority, ignored the sentencing court's proper opinion, and disregarded that the convicts had not even paid the fines imposed on them. Emphasising that "rule of law" cannot yield to compassion once liberty was obtained through jurisdictional fraud, the Court quashed the August 2022 remission orders and directed all eleven convicts to surrender to jail authorities within two weeks.
Lesson Learnt
Remission of a sentence must be decided by the state where the trial actually took place, not wherever the crime originally occurred, and any order obtained by concealing facts from a court, however final it may look, carries no legal force and can be set aside as a "nullity" whenever its effects are challenged, even years later.