Life imprisonment means jail until death: CJ
Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha today said life imprisonment means jail sentence of a convict until his or her natural death.
The chief justice made the observation while presiding over a four-member bench of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for hearing and delivering verdict on the appeals of two convicts who were earlier sentenced to death in a murder case in Savar.
The apex court commuted the death sentence of Ataur and Anwar in the case filed for killing a Zaman by shooting in Savar in 2001.
The trial court had sentenced Ataur and Anwar to death for the killing. The High Court then upheld their death penalty.
When the chief justice said life imprisonment means jail sentence of the convicts until their natural deaths, defence counsel Advocate Khandker Mahbub Hossain argued that life imprisonment is jail sentence for 30 years as per Section 57 of the Penal Code.
Chief Justice SK Sinha said an explanation will be given over his observation in the full text of the verdict.
Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told reporters at his office that SC said that life imprisonment means jail sentence until natural death, not 30 years’ imprisonment.
The SC will give an explanation to this effect in the full judgment of the case, he added.
Advocate Khandker Mahbub Hossain told The Daily Star that he hoped the Appellate Division will not say in the full verdict that life imprisonment means jail sentence until death.
Earlier in June last year, while visiting Kashimpur Jail in Gazipur, the chief justice had said life sentence means imprisonment until death, he added.
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