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Rashidul Jafar @ Chota vs. The State of Uttar Pradesh & Anr. (batch of 512 premature-release petitions)

Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2022 INSC 932Decided 6 Sept 2022
Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 336 of 2019
Dr. Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud · Hima Kohli

Background

Rashidul Jafar @ Chota, a life convict (convicted of murder and related IPC offences, Sessions Trial No. 245/1989), was one of 512 petitioners in a large batch of writ petitions filed under Article 32 by convicts undergoing life imprisonment in Uttar Pradesh seeking premature release. The Uttar Pradesh government's 2018 policy on premature release of life convicts was amended in July 2021 to add a new condition that no convict could be released before turning 60 years old, which petitioners argued was unconstitutional because premature release should be assessed under the policy as it stood on the date of conviction, and that indefinitely prolonging incarceration violated Article 21. A further amendment in May 2022 deleted the 60-year age condition. The Court's own prior orders in related cases (Dev Nath Singh, Rajkumar, and Brij Bhushan) had already held that the pre-amendment 2018 policy should govern. To manage this large batch, the Court on 24 August 2022 directed preparation of a consolidated status table (Annexure-A) for all 512 prisoners, including Rashidul Jafar, listing their offence, conviction date, appeal status, time served, and current status of their premature-release applications.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the objectionable 60-year age requirement (introduced in July 2021) had already been deleted by the May 2022 amendment, so no premature-release case should be rejected on that ground. It directed that all 512 prisoners in the batch (and beyond) be considered for premature release under whichever version of the policy is most beneficial to them, that no application need be separately filed (the onus being on prison and legal-services authorities to proactively identify eligible convicts), and that District Legal Services Authorities coordinate with jail authorities to ensure no eligible prisoner is overlooked. The Court set firm timelines: already-processed cases to be finally decided within one month, cases of convicts above 70 or with terminal illness prioritised and decided within two months, and all remaining cases within four months, with any existing interim bail orders to continue until each individual's premature-release application is decided. All the petitions in the batch, including Rashidul Jafar's, were disposed of on these common directions rather than through an individual merits assessment of each convict's case.

Lesson Learnt

When many prisoners face the same systemic problem (here, an arbitrary or wrongly-applied government remission policy), the Supreme Court can resolve the shared legal issue for the whole group at once and issue binding, time-bound directions to the administration, rather than making each individual litigate their case separately, but this means an individual petitioner's actual release still depends on the executive properly applying those directions to their specific file.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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