Sushil Kumar Shinde, the United Progressive Alliance Home Minister, who first recommended the rejection of the >mercy petition of Yakub Memon in April 2014 , told The Hindu , “It is true that I went through the case and since the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence, the President rejected the mercy petition.”
President Pranab Mukherjee, went through the case file and the mercy petition diligently on Wednesday again after Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh went to the President’s House himself.
A senior government official who was involved in the proceedings in 2014 said: “After we received Memon’s mercy petition signed by his brother [in October 2013], we sought a report from the Maharashtra government. In their response they said that the then Governor K. Sankaranarayanan had also rejected any clemency for him. Based on the report given by the State government that he be shown no leniency, we made a report and sent it to the then Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde for approval. All the death approval files are to be vetted by the Home Minister himself. We then sent it to President who went by our advice and rejected it on April 11, 2014.”
It was a Congress-led government in Maharashtra then. The Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in March 2013.
On Wednesday, Yakub filed a 14-page fresh mercy petition stating among other things that the TADA court issued a death warrant and informed him only “15 days prior to his hanging” thereby limiting his chances to seek any legal remedy.
