President Pranab Mukherjee turns down two more mercy petitions; 30 rejections now in tenure

President Pranab Mukherjee rejected mercy petitions in two more cases in the last week of May, bringing the total number of mercy pleas rejected by him to 30. This comes just weeks before Mukherjee’s term as head of State ends. The cases involved the 2012 rape and murder of a four-year-old girl in Indore by three men, and the 2007 gangrape and murder of a techie in Pune by a taxi driver and his friend,  The Times of India reported. [caption id=“attachment_3220462” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of President Pranab Mukherjee. PTI[/caption] Babu alias Ketan, Jitendra alias Jitu and Devendra alias Sunny were found guilty in the 2012 Indore case, while Purushottam Dasharath Borate and Pradeep Yashvant Kokade were convicted in the 2007 Pune case. These rejections come just months after the president in January commuted the death sentences of four convicts to life imprisonment, in the Bara massacre case. The convicts were Krishna Mochi, Nanhe Lal Mochi, Bir Kuer Paswan, and Dharmendra Singh alias Dharu Singh. The official website of the president’s secretariat says that there are no more mercy petitions pending before Mukherjee. The 30 petitions rejected by Mukherjee include those of 2008 Mumbai terror attack convict Ajmal Kasab, 2001 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, and those by Simon, Gnanaprakash, Madaiah and Bilavandran — associates of the notorious Indian brigand Veerappan. The number of mercy petitions rejected by Mukherjee stand in sharp contrast to that of his recent predecessors. Pratibha Patil granted clemency to 34 convicts during her tenure while rejecting three pleas, including the assassins of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi — Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan. APJ Abdul Kalam rejected one petition, left 14 pending and granted clemency in one case. He disposed of only two cases, rejecting the mercy petition of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, accused of raping and murdering a teenager. The election for the next president will take place in July 2017.