Key Points
New Delhi: A court in Banaskantha district of Gujarat Thursday sentenced former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Sanjiv Bhatt to 20 years in jail in a 1996 drug planting case...
He has now been held guilty of falsely implicating Sumer Singh Rajpurohit, a Rajasthan-based lawyer, by planting commercial quantities of opium in a hotel room..
In January, the Gujarat High Court had upheld the life sentence and murder conviction of Bhatt in a 1990 case of alleged custodial torture and death..
There is a misconception that a prisoner serving a life sentence has an indefeasible right to be released after completion of either 14 years or 20 years imprisonment..
Now, the trial court judge in the NDPS case against Bhatt has ordered that the 20-year sentence would run consecutively, after the earlier sentence in the custodial death case.. Delhi-based criminal lawyer Sarim Naved explained: Right now, he (Bhatt) is not serving this sentence, he is serving his life imprisonment sentence..
