Two years after having lost all legal remedies to challenge his death sentence, Mohammad Asif, the death row convict in the Red Fort terror attack case, won a legal battle on Tuesday. The Supreme Court allowed him to file a fresh review petition before it, which will be decided by a three-judge Bench in an open court hearing.
It was a Constitution Bench that decided to take this view after it noted that an earlier judgment of the apex court passed in September 2014 laid down the rule that hearing of review petitions of death row convicts will be heard in open court and not in chambers of the judges. By this, the court allowed death row prisoners to engage lawyers to point out any error that could possibly save them the gallows.
However, Arif was the lone exception as the said decision drew a cutoff by which it refused to extend the benefit to those accused whose curative petitions had been dismissed. A curative plea is the last legal remedy to reverse a SC decision. Arif’s curative petition was dismissed long back on January 23, 2014.
In this peculiar circumstance, the Bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur, Justices JS Khehar, J Chelameswar, PC Ghose and RF Nariman decided to modify the earlier order and permitted Asif to file a fresh review petition within a month.
Pakistani-origin Arif was part of lashkar-e-Tayyeba, the group which was involved for attacking the Red Fort on December 22, 2000. He was accused of helping the terrorists involved in the attack.