New Delhi: A lower court judge who had hit headlines in 2022 for having sentenced 38 people to death – the highest in India – in the Ahmedabad 2008 serial blast case, has been appointed Gujarat’s director of prosecution.
Ambalal R Patel, who had retired nearly a year ago, had, as a sessions judge, also rejected in 2023 the application of Mumbai-based activist Teesta Setalvad seeking discharge from the trial of alleged fabrication of evidence in the 2002 Godhra riots-related cases.
The judge had also presided over the criminal prosecution initiated against former state director general of police R B Sreekumar and former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt. Both Sreekumar and Bhatt, along with Setalvad, have charges of hatching a ‘conspiracy’ to frame Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others in the Gujarat riots of 2002.
While Setalvad was granted bail by the Supreme Court and Sreekumar by the Gujarat high court, Bhatt has been in judicial custody under multiple charges including a 20-year jail term in another case.
The appeals by those given the death penalty in the 2008 serial blast case, and the applications by the Gujarat government to get their death penalty confirmed, are pending at the state high court.
A Times of India report has pointed out, “According to Section 366 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a death sentence is not executed unless it is confirmed any a high court in case the sentence is warded by a sessions court. At the same time, the high court cannot confirm the sentence or acquit the persons before the time allowed to prefer an appeal has expired, or the appeal is disposed off, according to section 368 of the Indian Penal Code.”
Patel had also pronounced life imprisonment to 11 others in the case.
Retired judge Patel, now as the state’s director of prosecution, can intervene in the case, can also “expedite the proceedings and give an opinion on the filing of appeals”.
The post of director of prosecution in Gujarat had been lying dormant for some years. As per an Indian Express report, in 2019, a committee was formed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to revive the directorate of prosecution as per the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code “to increase the conviction rate in criminal cases.” The committee comprised of senior officers of the state Home, Legal and Legislation departments.
In January 2022, the Gujarat directorate of prosecution had come to notice for the Supreme Court pulling it up for not appealing against a high court order granting bail to an accused in a case where a Dalit man was brutally murdered while he was collecting scrap from outside a factory. The bench comprising Justices M.R. Shah and B.V. Nagarathna had said that “the State and Director of Prosecution failed in (their) duties”.
