Can an offender serve a common sentence for two different crimes? A full bench of the Bombay High Court that was faced with the question, reserved its judgment on the issue on Tuesday.
Can an offender serve a common sentence for two different crimes? A full bench of the Bombay High Court that was faced with the question, reserved its judgment on the issue on Tuesday.
The question sprang before the court after an HIV+ convict (name withheld), lodged in the Kolhapur Central Prison, wrote a letter to the Bombay High Court on December 27, 2008. In his letter, the man, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment by two different courts, had written that he had contracted HIV and his days were numbered. He urged the court to allow him to serve his sentences — two years in one offence and seven years in another — concurrently instead of consecutively.
The man was convicted by a sessions court in Amritsar for an offence under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and sentenced to two years imprisonment in November 2005. But prior to that he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment by a sessions court in Satara on charges of dacoity. He has urged in his letter that he has already served two years handed out by the Amritsar court. However, if his sentence remains consecutive, he will have to serve seven more years that he was given by Satara sessions court. On the other hand, if the sentences are made consecutive, he may have to serve only five more years in prison.
The convict, a father of two daughters and a son, said he wished to spend his last days with his family as his life was uncertain due to his illness.
The question in law is whether a court can use its discretion under section 427 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), to convert consecutive imprisonment sentences awarded to a convict into concurrent ones. The case was referred to the full bench of the court by Justice Abhay Oka on August 22 after he came across two conflicting views taken by different benches of the court.
Arguing the applicant’s case, advocate Yug Chaudhry, citing 11 precedents in law, said that the sentences would run consecutively but the court had the power to make them concurrent. Additional public prosecutors Aruna Kamath-Pai and Prajakta Shinde, however, said that the sentences could not be made concurrent as the convictions are based on two totally independent incidents.
After hearing the arguments on Tuesday, chief justice Swatanter Kumar, Justice SA Bobade and Justice VK Tahilramani reserved their judgment.
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