New Delhi, March 8: Dara Singh, key accused in the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two minor sons, today filed a review petition in the Supreme Court against the apex court’s recent decision to award him a life term while acquitting 11 others.

The review was filed through lawyer Sibo Sankar Mishra.

It has urged the court to also extend him benefit of doubt extended to the others who were acquitted.

The review petition raises three key questions about the veracity of the eyewitness accounts, no substantive link between him and the incident except slogans which were a weak form of evidence and also several contradictions in the statements of witnesses.

The apex court had on January 21, 2011, upheld the life term awarded by Orissa High Court to Dara.

A bench, comprising Justices P. Sathasivam and Dr B.S. Chauhan, rejected a CBI plea to enhance his life term to death.

Life term is the rule, death the exception in the “rarest of rare” cases, the court had said weighing all evidences against Dara Singh and fellow convict Mahender Hembram, who also got a life term.

Both Dara and Hembram had challenged their conviction in the Supreme Court.

But the court while rejecting the evidence against the other accused, ruled against them saying that “even in the midst of uncertainties, witnesses have specified the roles of Dara Singh and Hembram” in the incident.

Eleven others, acquitted by Orissa High Court, got away for lack of evidence pointing out their role in the conspiracy to kill Staines and his sons, aged 10 and 6 respectively. “…In absence of definite assertion from the prosecution side, about their specific role and involvement… it is not safe to convict them,” the bench said.

The bench observed that all of them were “poor tribals” while acquitting them.

The court had then created quite a flutter when it had observed: “though Staines and his two minor sons were burnt to death while sleeping inside a station wagon at Manoharpur, the intention was to teach him a lesson to about his religious activities, namely, converting poor tribals to Christianity”.

In observations that stirred a controversy and forced the bench to retract them, the bench frowned upon violence in the name of religion, but in the same breath added that there could not be any justification for interfering with someone’s belief by “conversion”.

“In a country like ours where discrimination on the ground of caste or religion is a taboo, taking lives of persons belonging to another caste or religion is bound to have a dangerous and reactive effect on the society at large. It strikes at the very root of the orderly society which the founding fathers of our Constitution dreamt of,” the bench said.

“Our concept of secularism is that the state will have no religion. The state shall treat all religions and religious groups equally and with equal respect without in any manner interfering with their individual right of religion, faith and worship.”

The bench referred to President K R. Narayanan’s remarks that “Indian unity was based on a tradition of tolerance, which is at once a pragmatic concept for living together and a philosophical concept of finding truth and goodness in every religion“.

It also expressed the hope that Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of religion playing a positive role in bringing India’s numerous religion and communities into an integrated prosperous nation would be realised by way of equal respect for all religions.

“It is undisputed that there is no justification for interfering in someone’s belief by way of ‘use of force’, provocation, conversion, incitement or upon a flawed premise that one religion is better than the other,” the bench said.

Within days, after a vocal protest by the minority Christian community, the court deleted all the references to conversion from its judgement.

Today, Dara made it one of the key points for a review of the judgement. “Such alteration of the judgment pronounced in open court without notice to the parties, without following principles of natural justice, without either parties having filed any application to do so is in gross disregard of provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, the Supreme Court Rules, 1966 and all settled notions of law and against the criminal jurisprudence,” his review said.

“It is a settled principle of law that once the court pronounces judgment in a matter, the proceeding before it attains finality as such the proceeding is said to be terminated, therefore, the court become a ‘functos officio’. Unless there is any application by the either party the court cannot assume jurisdiction to exercise even its inherent jurisdiction under Article 142 of the Constitution of India,” it said.

Staines, who worked among lepers in Orissa, and his sons were burnt to death on the midnight of Jan 22-23, 1999. The CBI took over the investigation after an international uproar over the deaths.

On the basis of the agency’s charge-sheet, 14 accused persons were put on trial. Apart from these accused, one minor was tried by juvenile court. The prosecution examined 55 witnesses whereas in defence 25 witnesses were examined.

All the accused were convicted by the sessions judge, Khurda, on Sept 15, 2003. Dara Singh was awarded death and all others got life terms. On appeal, the High Court commuted Dara’s death to life and confirmed Hembram’s life term, but acquitted others.

The High Court in its judgement had concluded that the witnesses were not trustworthy and no credence could be given to their statements. It had observed that their confessional statements were procured under threat and coercion, in a statement reflecting on the way of working of the CBI.