HC asks Tihar to show papers of Tandoor case convict's release

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The Delhi High Court today asked the Tihar jail authorities to produce the minutes of meeting of the Sentence Review Board in which former Congress youth leader Sushil Kumar Sharma's plea for premature release was taken up for consideration.
Justice Ashutosh Kumar issued the direction on Sharma's plea, who is serving life imprisonment for murdering his wife Naina Sahni and throwing her body in a restaurant's tandoor here.
The court also sought the convict's latest nominal roll from the Tihar Jail Superintendent.
Sharma's counsel Sumeet Verma and Amit Sahni moved the court for premature release, claiming that their client has spent over 25 years in jail, which is the maximum prescribed punishment as per the Sentence Review Board guidelines.

The counsel submitted that the years also include four years in remission earned over the period of imprisonment.
They also sought parole till the time the Board decided his plea for premature release.

Taking note of this, the court asked the authorities to produce the details of Board's proceedings held recently.
It was of the view that there should not be a "pick and choose" criteria.
In September 2015, twenty years after he was sent to jail for the murder of his wife, Sharma was released on unconditional parole till a final decision on his release was taken.
Now 56, Sharma had shot his wife Naina Sahni to death in 1995 objecting to her alleged relationship with a male friend. He had then chopped her body into pieces and attempted to burn it in a restaurant's oven.

Popularly known as the tandoor murder case, it is one of the landmark cases in India in which DNA evidence and a second autopsy were used to establish the guilt of the accused.
The convict's counsel told the court that a Supreme Court bench in 2013 had commuted the death penalty awarded to Sharma to life imprisonment and held that the crime committed by Sharma was "not a crime against society" but a murder arising out of a "strained personal relationship".
The top court had also held that there was a possibility of Sharma's rehabilitation, the counsel said.