Court orders release of Ansal brothers

Trial cannot have a vindictive approach, says court in Uphaar fire tragedy evidence tampering case 

A day after upholding the conviction of real-estate barons Sushil Ansal, 83 and Gopal Ansal,74, a Delhi court on Tuesday reduced their 7-year jail sentence to the “period already undergone” in judicial custody, in the evidence tampering case linked to the Uphaar fire tragedy of 1997 in which 59 people were killed and over 100 were injured. The court also increased the fine imposed on them to ₹3 crore each.

Principal District and Sessions Judge Dharmesh Sharma said the sentence awarded to the Ansal brothers by the trial court in November last year was “not only harsh, onerous but also disproportionate to the offence committed”, thereby paving the way for their release from Tihar jail here.

Sympathising with the victims and their families, the court said it understood the gravity of the tragedy and the “deep anguish, pain and perennial misery” that they have faced.

The judge said that the court understood “that the surviving family members do not want the culprits to go scot-free and enjoy rights and liberties in the remainder of their lives, but this whole criminal litigation cannot be converted by the prosecution into an inhuman and vindictive approach to the present appellants/convicts.”

The court noted that even though Section 409 of the IPC (criminal breach of trust) attracts a maximum punishment of life imprisonment, the proportionality test in criminal jurisprudence cannot be applied in a manner so that the Ansals suffer greater punishment than what they have already served in the main fire tragedy case.

Mr. Sharma added that the trial court’s order “absolutely sidelined the criminal jurisprudence on sentencing that envisages punishment in proportion to the crime committed and sentence with the avowed object of deterrence and reformation.”

While upholding the conviction of the Ansal brothers and the other accused, the court held that they had “in all human probabilities hatched a criminal conspiracy to cause the disappearance of certain documents”, however, “All said and done, the trial in the main case was delayed hardly by six months.”