E-Paper
No SC reprieve for Swami Shraddhanand who buried his wife alive in 1991
Swami Shraddhanand was sentenced to death in 2000. Eight years later, the SC substituted the death penalty with imprisonment for the rest of his life
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a review petition by 84-year-old Swami Shraddhanand aka Murli Manohar Mishra who was sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of his life for burying his wife alive in Bengaluru in 1991.
Dismissing the review petition, a three-judge bench comprising justices Bhushan R Gavai, PK Mishra and KV Viswanathan said the special category of punishment - imprisonment for the remainder of the convict’s natural life - had been upheld by later judgments including a five-judge constitution bench in Union of India v V. Sriharan (2015).
The punishment was handed out to Shraddhanand by a three-judge bench of the top court back in 2008 which substituted the death penalty confirmed by the high court with “imprisonment for life” and directed that “he shall not be released from prison till the rest of his life.”
Shraddhanand was convicted in 2000 of killing his wife Shakereh Khaleeli to usurp her property in 1991. It was only three years later in 1994 that the police cracked the case and exhumed her body from a 100-foot-deep ditch in the courtyard of her bungalow in Bengaluru’s Richmond Road. Police said Shraddhanand sedated her tea and buried her alive when she passed out.
Shakereh Khaleeli was the granddaughter of the erstwhile Dewan of Mysore and was initially married to a senior diplomat with whom she had four daughters. She divorced him in 1986 and married Sharaddhanand.
Shakereh’s gruesome murder is the subject of a 2023 docuseries streamed on Amazon Prime Video called ‘Dancing on the Grave ‘.
In his review petition, Sharaddhanand, who is presently lodged in Central Jail at Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, cited his record at the jail where he said, had earned five best prisoner awards and had maintained good conduct.
Advocates Tripurari Ray and Varun Thakur appearing for the convict argued that the court must provide a punishment prescribed by law. In his case, the punishment could be either death or life imprisonment but not imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life, they said.
The court had issued notice on the review plea in September this year, condoning a 16-year-old delay in entertaining a challenge to its decision of 2008 which did not permit him to be released even for a single day on parole or furlough.
Wednesday’s verdict made it clear that it only deals with provisions of commutation and remission contained in the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Prison Act and the rules framed by various states and was not concerned with the Constitutional provisions of Articles 72 and 161 that are in the nature of the state’s sovereign powers.
