Within a month of being pulled up by the Delhi High Court for sitting over parole applications of underprivileged prisoners and directions to dispose of the pending pleas within a month, the Delhi Government has fast tracked the process.
Counsel for the Government Meira Bhatia on Monday informed the High Court that it had till date disposed of 88 applications of a total of 98 pending with it. She submitted that now only 10 applications remained to be considered and decided.
Ms. Bhatia gave this information to a Division Bench of the Court comprising Justice A.P. Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar.
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The Bench was hearing a bunch of petition by a group of Tihar Jail inmates. These inmates had jointly written a letter to the Chief Justice mentioning their grievances on the disposal of their parole applications. The Chief Justice had converted it into a petition.
The letter alleged that the inmates sought parole to participate in certain family functions but generally their applications were not processed in time resulting in making parole applications futile.
First a Single Bench and then a Division Bench of the Court had pulled up the Government for being class biased in granting parole to Manu Sharma, serving life imprisonment in the Jessica Lal murder case, and sitting over pleas of poor prisoners.
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The Single Bench had also asked the Government to dispose of the pending applications within a month.
The Single Bench had made these scathing remarks while hearing a petition by a former Delhi Police’s Head Constable seeking parole for three months for filing a special leave petition in the Supreme Court against his conviction in the Connaught Place shooting case.
The petitioner’s application has been pending with the Home Department for more than two months.
The Division Bench later asked the Principal Secretary (Home) of the Delhi Government and the Delhi Police Commissioner to file affidavits on the action so far taken in the matter on December 23.