New Delhi: Delhi High Court has held that the heinousness of a crime cannot become a “permanent bar to remission”, ordering the release of a former President’s Bodyguards (PBG) member serving a life sentence in the 2003 Buddha Jayanti Park gang rape case involving a 17-year-old Delhi University student. Justice Neena Bansal Krishna, in a recent order, directed the release of Harpreet Singh, noting that he had spent 21 years in prison with “clean conduct” and earned multiple commendations, yet the Sentence Review Board (SRB) had rejected his plea for remission 12 times.
“The petitioner’s journey, from being a public servant who fell into crime to a prisoner who earned 21 years of clean conduct and multiple commendations, demonstrates that the reformative objective of his sentence is fulfilled,” the court observed. The judge said the SRB’s repeated rejections, based solely on the offence’s gravity, reflected “a bureaucratic haze”, and sending Singh’s application back would be “an exercise in futility”. “The gravity of an offence is a static, historical fact; it does not change with time,” the court noted, adding that treating past heinousness as a lifelong bar to remission amounts to “retributive death by incarceration”, undermining the state’s reformative framework. Justice Krishna said that once a convict has demonstrably reformed, “the only decision to follow is grant of remission”, and it would not serve justice to return the matter to the SRB. The order also quoted writer Franz Kafka, drawing a parallel with a protagonist “trapped in an unchanging image”, and said the Constitution, anchored in reformative justice, forbids condemning a prisoner to “eternal alienation” once correction is achieved. The court criticised the SRB for keeping Singh “trapped in the frozen image of his past criminality”, ignoring his “reverse metamorphosis” over two decades through exemplary conduct and discipline. In 2012, the high court upheld the conviction of four former PBG members in the case, noting they had exhibited “extreme depravity”. Harpreet Singh and Satender Singh were awarded life terms, while co-accused Kuldeep Singh and Munesh Kumar received 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment for robbery, kidnapping and aiding the assault.
