Today, On 11th December, The Supreme Court rejected former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s plea to suspend his 20-year sentence in the 1996 drug seizure case. Justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi refused to consider his appeal, denying him relief.
The Supreme Court turned down a request made by former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt to suspend his 20-year prison sentence related to a drug seizure incident from 1996.
A bench consisting of Justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi expressed their unwillingness to consider the appeal. Bhatt had urged the court to suspend the sentence linked to his conviction in the case.
In 1996, a sessions court in Palanpur, located in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district, found Bhatt guilty of wrongfully accusing a Rajasthan lawyer.
He alleged that police had discovered drugs in a hotel room in Palanpur where the lawyer was staying.
Bhatt, who lost his job in 2015, served as the superintendent of police in Banaskantha during the incident. Under his supervision, the district police arrested Sumersingh Rajpurohit, the Rajasthan-based lawyer, claiming they seized drugs from his hotel room.
However, the Rajasthan police later clarified that Rajpurohit was wrongly accused by the Banaskantha police to force him to hand over a disputed property in Pali, Rajasthan.
In 1999, former police inspector I B Vyas sought a comprehensive investigation into the case by petitioning the Gujarat High Court. Bhatt was arrested by the state CID in September 2018 under the NDPS Act and has since been incarcerated in Palanpur sub-jail.
Last year, he approached the Supreme Court to request the transfer of the trial in the nearly three-decade-old drug case to another sessions court, claiming bias. He also sought to have the trial court’s proceedings officially recorded.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court dismissed his request and imposed a fine of Rs 3 lakh for accusing a lower court judge of bias in handling the drug planting case.