The Jharkhand High Court found on Friday that Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad was still 27 days away from serving half his sentence in one of the forage scam cases in which he was convicted and sentenced. to five years in prison in January. 2018.
Therefore, the court composed of Judge Aparesh Kumar Singh postponed the hearing on Yadav’s bail declaration to 9 October at the request of his lawyer Kapil Sibal.
Former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, who has been under custodial treatment at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ranchi, moved the request for bail on the grounds that he had already completed half of the sentence in the case mentioned for fraud. withdrawal of Rs 33.13 crore from the Chaibasa treasury for fictitious expenses on fodder and other expenses for livestock.
Yadav had suffered a major shock in the forage scam case on September 30, 2013, when a trial court in Ranchi found him guilty in the first of six cases against him. The sentence imposed five years in prison, the disqualification of Parliament and the prohibition to participate in the elections. The Supreme Court released him on bail in December of that year.
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The former chief minister of Bihar’s problems were renewed again after December 23, 2017, when he was convicted in three other fodder scam cases in quick succession. Since then, he has been in jail.
Of these three cases, he had been released on bail in one of them last year on the basis that he had served half of the 3.5 years in prison he was granted. In the second case, it has submitted the aforementioned request for bail for a similar reason.
Opposing his release on bail, the IWC maintained that custody of Yadav, in this case, had not yet begun as he had not completed full custody in previous cases. He pointed to the provision of Section 427 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) arguing that the court never ordered that the sentences imposed on him in different fodder scam cases be executed simultaneously.
“In the absence of such an order, custody of Prasad in subsequent cases would begin only after the completion of the sentencing of the earlier cases under Section 427 of the CrPC,” said CBI attorney and Deputy Attorney General Rajiv Sinha.
However, lead attorney Kapil Sibal, representing Yadav, argued that the CBI had not raised this point with respect to bail requests previously filed by any of those convicted of forage scam.
In his previous case as well, the agency did not raise this argument and the court granted him bail upon completion of half the sentence, Sibal argued.
However, the court, after calculating the period of custody served by Yadav in this case, found that there were still 27 days left to cover half of the five-year sentence. At Sibal’s request, he postponed the hearing to October 9.
After spending the initial two months from December 2017 to February 2018, in the Birsa Munda central prison in Ranchi, Lalu Prasad Yadav had developed health complications in March 2018 and was transferred to hospital. Since then, he has never returned to jail.
After a sharp spike in Covid-19 cases in August, he was moved from the RIMS pay room to the hospital director’s bungalow.
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