Chennai: “Leave and temporary release are facets of human dignity that cannot be suspended indefinitely merely due to the pendency of a judicial appeal,” a five-judge bench of the Madras high court said while asserting that there is no bar for granting ordinary/emergency leave for convicts, even if their appeals against conviction were pending before appellate courts.“We find merit in the argument of amicus curiae and senior advocate Abudu Kumar Rajarathinam that while an appeal is pending, the conviction is not finally fixed in the sense of absolute finality, yet the status of the individual has legally transitioned from an under-trial to a convict,” a bench comprising Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari, Justice C V Karthikeyan, Justice A D Jagadish Chandira, Justice M Nirmal Kumar and Justice Sunder Mohan said on Wednesday.The bench made the observations while answering a reference made by a division bench of the court in view of conflicting judgments of various benches of the court on the issue.“We are prima facie of the view that, by necessary implication, the Tamil Nadu Suspension of Sentence Rules remain a potent instrument for reformative leave for all other categories of prisoners except pending trial cases, including those in the appellate stage. To deny the benefit of the rules to the prisoners would be to ignore the explicit exclusionary boundary set by rules,” the bench said.Recording the submission of the amicus that the Supreme Court has already seized of the matter in Mukesh Kumar case, in which Tamil Nadu is also a party respondent, the bench said, “it is stated by the amicus that the final decision of the apex court in the case would govern the whole nation.”Until then, a state of legal uncertainty cannot be allowed to prejudice the liberty of convicted prisoners. Therefore, the direction of the division bench restraining the high court registry from entertaining applications for emergency or ordinary leave under the rules is hereby kept in abeyance. The registry shall entertain the petitions in terms of the full bench decision in the T Ramalakshmi case, the bench said.
