Death row convict Devinder Singh Bhullar got a breather as the government agreed to constitute another medical board to ascertain his medical condition. Government sources said the Delhi government will constitute a new medical board in November to examine Bhullar’s health condition. The death row convict reportedly suffers from mental illness. The report of the medical board will be crucial to ascertain whether the jail authorities can go ahead with his execution or not.
In April 2013, the Supreme Court had rejected Bhullar’s appeal to commute his sentence to life imprisonment setting the stage for his execution. However, Bhullar’s hanging was deferred after the then Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna cited his bad mental and physical health status. Bhullar’s execution had been given a moratorium of six months which comes to an end in November.
The medical board, set up earlier in 2013, in its report shared with the Delhi government and the Union home ministry, had opined that Bhullar suffered from ‘’severe depression with psychotic symptoms” which prompted the authorities to defer his execution on the basis of the jail manual provisions which mandated that no death row convict can be executed unless he is certified by the doctors as physically and mentally fit.
Bhullar was awarded capital punishment in 2001 by the trial court after being convicted in the 1993 Delhi blast case. In 2002, the Supreme Court had dismissed Bhullar’s plea against his conviction and sentence. His wife Navneet Kaur then sought clemency for him by filing a mercy petition before the President in 2003.
The mercy plea was rejected by former President Pratibha Patel in 2011. Bhullar’s wife contends that he is a psychiatric patient who has suffered because of the delay in deciding his mercy petition. Since 2010, Bhullar is being treated at the Institute for Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences in Delhi.