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Showing contexts for: Motion Re in Shiv Mohan Singh vs State (Delhi Administration) on 10 March, 1977Matching Fragments
The focus, therefore; must turn on the existence of grounds of manifest miscarriage of justice unavailable on the earlier occasions. Before that, a brief reference may be made to the 'criminal' facts.
A treacherous murder of a tender school-boy by the petitioner, the circumstances of which were so heartless and heinous, terminated condiguly at the trial court and the High Court, the extreme penalty having been visited on the offender for his horrendous killing. This Court refused special leave to appeal, drawing the dark curtain' on the criminal proceedings. The petitioner struggled to extricate himself from the executioner by a sequence of desperate steps. On his behalf, a motion for re-hearing the special leave petition was fruitlessly made to this Court. A review petition was made again to this Court in vain. Yet another, out of the same motive but with modified reliefs, was made and dismissed. Then followed an application for directions regarding remand of the case to the court of sessions for reconsideration of the sentence in the light of s. 235(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973. Dismissal of this proceeding did not deter the petitioner from persisting in moving this Court. That is how the present review peti- tion has been put in on his behalf by his father. Mercy petitions to the President punctuated the court proceedings but they too were turned down. The convict, nevertheless, clung on and. as stated earlier, his pathetic persistence in the plea for commutation has been pressed before us by counsel on two scores. He has urged that a decision of this Court in Santa Singh v. State of Punjab(1) of which he was not aware at the earlier stages entitles. him to a remand to the Sessions Court for reconsideration of the sentence of death. Secondly, he has also pressed upon us personal and social circumstances which have re- ceived judicial approval as justifying the imposition of the lesser sentence of life imprisonment even where the offence of murder has been made out.