New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Monday questioned jail authorities over recovery of four knives from Tihar premises where gangster Tillu Tajpuriya was stabbed to death allegedly by inmates belonging to a rival gang.
The court asked why no preventive or remedial action was taken by authorities when the incident took place as the entire incident was captured on CCTV cameras installed in jail premises.
Justice Jasmeet Singh issued notice to the Director General of Prisons (Delhi), Delhi government and Commissioner of Police on a petition filed by Tajpuriya’s father and brother seeking an investigation by the CBI into the “brutal murder” inside Tihar Jail premises on May 2.
The petitioners, represented through senior advocate Maninder Singh, said they are DTC drivers and sought adequate security for themselves.
The high court directed the Delhi Police to ensure safety and security of both the petitioners, who are father and brother of the deceased, and listed the matter for further hearing on May 25.
It directed the Tihar jail authorities to file an affidavit as to how four knives were found in prison and asked the jail superintendent concerned to be present in the court on the next date of hearing.
A CCTV video from Tihar Jail which emerged on social media purportedly showed Tajpuriya being attacked in front of security personnel and also when they were carrying him away after he was stabbed.
Tajpuriya was assaulted with improvised weapons allegedly by four members of the Gogi gang inside the high-security prison on May 2.
The accused attacked him for a second time when he was being carried away by security personnel, according to the footage.
In the footage, it appears that the security personnel are mute spectators while the assailants kept repeatedly attacking the gangster.
According to jail officials, seven personnel of the Tamil Nadu Special Police (TNSP), who were on duty at a Tihar prison cell when Tajpuriya was stabbed to death, have been suspended following the incident.
New Delhi: The Delhi government’s Prisons department on Friday suspended eight Tihar Jail staff members in connection with the fatal stabbing of gangster Tillu Tajpuriya on the premises, officials said.
Tajpuriya was killed early on Tuesday allegedly by four members of the rival Gogi gang — Deepak alias Titar, Yogesh alias Tunda, Rajesh, and Riyaz Khan — who stabbed him “92 times”.
A senior Prisons department official said they conducted a departmental inquiry based on which eight staff members were suspended.
The officer had earlier said, “The report was received on Friday and lapses were found on the part of nine staff members. Out of them, seven — three assistant superintendents and four warders — have been suspended.
“We had a meeting with officials of the Tamil Nadu Special Police and they have also agreed to take departmental action against their personnel.”
The Tamil Nadu Special Police provides security on the jail premises.
Sources said Tihar Jail Director-General Sanjay Beniwal met Lt Governor VK Saxena and presented him a detailed report on the stabbing.
A fresh CCTV video from Tihar Jail emerged on social media purportedly showing Tajpuriya being attacked in front of security personnel as well when they were carrying him away after he was stabbed.
Tajpuriya was assaulted with improvised weapons by the Gogi gang members inside the high security prison on Tuesday morning. But he was still alive and was being carried away by the prison security personnel when the accused attacked him for a second time, according to the fresh footage.
The footage shows security personnel were in a corridor when the accused barged in through the door and again attacked Tajpuriya. He could be seen moving his leg in the video, confirming he was alive at that time. In the footage, it appears that the security personnel remained a bystander while the assailants keep attacking the gangster.
Moradabad: Former Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Sunday said under the BJP governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh the era of “political patronage” to criminals has been converted into an “era of prison” for such people.
Addressing public meetings here while campaigning for the urban civic bodies elections, the BJP leader said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts towards “political purification” have yielded results on the ground and the country is successfully moving forward on the path of development with dignity.
“Prime Minister Modi’s ‘mahayagya’ for political purification is the perfect solution for political pollution,” he was quoted as saying in a statement released by his office.
The BJP’s good governance has demolished the “deceit of appeasement and communal politics” with determination of development without discrimination, Naqvi said.
“Phony political vendors of votes have been isolated and people’s participation in progress has created an atmosphere of trust with development,” he said.
The BJP leader said that the Modi-Yogi governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh have crushed the “curse of curfew, corruption and crime”.
The era of “political patronage” to corrupt and criminals has now been converted into an era of “prison” for such people, he said.
Naqvi also urged people to demolish barriers of caste, community, region and religion and move forward on the path of inclusive empowerment.
He also listened to the 100th episode of PM’s ‘Mann Ki Baat’ with people in Moradabad.
MOSCOW — A Russian court on Monday slapped opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza with 25 years in prison for treason and other claimed offenses.
Moscow City Court sentenced Kara-Murza to a penal colony for spreading “fake news” about the army and “cooperation with an undesirable organization,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin steps up his crackdown on dissent and Russian civil society. But the bulk of his sentence had to do with another, third charge: treason, in the first time anyone has been convicted on that count for making public statements containing publicly available information.
On the courthouse steps, British Ambassador Deborah Bronnert called the sentence for Kara-Murza, who holds both Russian and British citizenship, “shocking.” Her U.S. counterpart said the verdict was an attempt “to silence dissent in this country.”
The U.K. summoned the Russian ambassador after the conviction, with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly calling for Kara-Murza’s “immediate release.”
Upon traveling to Russia in April 2022, Kara-Murza was detained for disobeying police orders. From that moment the charges piled up: first for spreading “fake news” about the Russian armed forces, then for his participation in an “undesirable organization,” and last for treason, on account of three public speeches he gave in the U.S., Finland and Portugal. The charges, all of which Kara-Murza denies, were expanded to treason last October.
A close associate of the late opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015, Kara-Murza was one of the last remaining prominent Putin critics still alive and walking free. But over the years he has ruffled many feathers as a main advocate for the Magnitsky Act, which long before the war called upon countries to target Russians involved in human rights violations and corruption.
The defense’s attempts to remove the judge — who is also on the Magnitsky list — were dismissed.
Kara-Murza continued to speak out against the Kremlin despite mounting personal risks, including what he described as poisonings by the Russian security services in 2015 and 2017, where he suddenly became ill, falling into a coma before eventually recovering.
Neither journalists nor high-ranking diplomats were allowed into the courtroom to witness the ruling and instead followed the sentencing on a screen.
Kara-Murza was in a glass cage, dressed in jeans and a gray blazer, with his mother and his lawyer standing outside of the cage. He smiled when the sentence was read out.
After the verdict Oleg Orlov, the co-chair of Russia’s oldest human rights group, Memorial, who himself is facing charges for “discrediting the Russian army,” drew a parallel with the Soviet Union, when “people were also jailed for words.” Kara-Murza compared the legal process to Stalin-era trials, in his appearance at court.
Kara-Murza’s lawyer Maria Eismont said the sentence was “a boost to his self esteem, the highest grade he could have gotten for his work as a politician and active citizen,” but added that there were serious concerns about his health.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Those requirements are minimal: A person must be at least 35 years old, must be a natural-born citizen and must have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years.
The Supreme Court has never weighed in directly on those requirements, Mazo said, but in a 1995 case, the justices rejected an attempt by Arkansas to impose term limits on its U.S. senators and House members. That logic seems to extend to any attempt by a state to declare a presidential candidate ineligible for reasons not spelled out in the Constitution, the professor added.
States remain free to exclude felons from the ballot for state and local positions, just not federal ones, Mazo said. “In the states, we have different rules,” he said.
What would happen if a person in prison actually won the presidency is a thornier question. Would the new president have to govern from a jail cell?
Probably not. Many legal experts argue that a state-court sentence would have to be held in abeyance. Whether a federal sentence would also have to be postponed is less clear, but the question might not matter if the new president used his pardon power to set himself free — or preemptively pardon himself from any pending federal charges. (The pardon power covers federal crimes, but not state crimes like the New York charges for which Trump was indicted this week.)
Stebenne noted that Trump has extra motivation to win and dodge whatever charges federal prosecutors may be considering against him. “It provides a strange reason to run, but a powerful incentive,” the professor said. “If Trump attempted to do that, it would probably create some sort of constitutional crisis.”
An exotic cast of characters
After Debs, the history of prisoners seeking the presidency is peppered with eccentric personalities.
Conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche ran for the White House eight times, with one of those bids — in 1992 — coming as he served a 15-year sentence for mail fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion. He was released in 1994 and died in 2019.
And there’s already one prominent declared candidate running from prison in the 2024 contest: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic. The former zookeeper and star of the Netflix “Tiger King” series is running as a Libertarian after filing candidacy papers in February with the Federal Election Commission.
Maldonado-Passage is mounting his presidential bid from a medical center for federal inmates in Fort Worth, Texas, where he’s serving a 21-year sentence for a slew of animal trafficking and abuse offenses as well as attempting to arrange the murder-for-hire of a rival private zoo owner, Carole Baskin.
Despite the fact that it came over a century ago, Debs’ candidacy may bear the closest resemblance to the one Trump could wind up pursuing if he’s jailed before November 2024.
One notable parallel is that Debs was imprisoned under one of the same statutes that Trump is now being investigated for potentially violating: the Espionage Act. Debs was accused of violating provisions of the law that prohibited encouraging insubordination in the armed forces or interference with the enlistment of troops.
More than a century later, federal prosecutors have indicated in court filings that they’re investigating the presence of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as a potential violation of another Espionage Act provision barring “willful retention” of national defense information after a request to return it. No charges have been filed, and Trump has denied wrongdoing.
Debs’ key conviction and his 10-year sentence were upheld by the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes eventually became one of the court’s biggest champions of free expression, but the Debs opinion is now seen as a low point in the protection of the First Amendment during wartime.
“He was in prison on free-speech principles,” Dreier said, noting that when prosecutors had trouble proving exactly what Debs said, he essentially admitted to it.
At his trial, Debs declared to the jury: “I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone.”
Trump’s motivations in the New York hush money scheme that prompted his indictment this week seem considerably less pure, Dreier noted. “There are people that admire Trump,” he said, “but nobody thinks he’s going to prison on principle.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
MOSCOW — Jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is “cheerful” and doing well as he sits in pre-trial detention, a Russian prison watchdog claimed Monday — the first report on his condition since his arrest on espionage charges.
“At the time of my visit, he was cheerful, there were a lot of jokes during our conversation,” Alexei Melnikov, a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission (ONK), wrote in a post on Telegram late Monday.
Melnikov is the first outsider to have been granted access to the American journalist since his arrest last Wednesday while on an assignment in Yekaterinburg, accused of collecting classified information on a defense company for “the American side.”
No other foreign journalist has been arrested in Russia since the Cold War, and Gershkovich’s case marks a new low for the increasingly fraught relationship between Russia and the United States. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed without evidence that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed,” while the White House has dismissed the case as “ridiculous.” Gershkovich’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, has called the allegations “utter nonsense.”
If found guilty of spying, Gershkovich faces a sentence of 20 years in a penal colony.
The journalist is currently being held alone in a two-person cell while undergoing a period of quarantine to rule out coronavirus infection, according to Melnikov, whose ONK was set up as an independent prison monitoring group, though in recent years it has been purged of its most vocal and Kremlin-critical members.
Melnikov said the cell contains a television with 20 channels, as well as a radio and a fridge. “Meals meet the established standards. Yesterday, for example, for lunch there was cabbage soup, potatoes and chicken, and for breakfast there was porridge,” Melnikov said.
Gershkovich has also been allowed to go for daily walks, according to Melnikov, adding that the journalist had not expressed any complaints and was reading Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” from the prison’s library.
The reporter is set to be held in Moscow’s high-security Lefortovo prison pending trial until May 29.
Cases of espionage and treason, their domestic equivalent, are conducted under a veil of secrecy, sheltering them from public scrutiny.
But the general assumption among independent Russia experts is that Gershkovich is being used to boost Russia’s negotiating position in a possible future prisoner swap for Russian citizens jailed in the United States.
In December, American basketball player Brittney Griner, jailed in Russia on drug charges, was exchanged for arms dealer Viktor Bout. Though hailed by Griner’s supporters, the deal brokered by Joe Biden’s administration also drew criticism for potentially encouraging Russia to use American citizens as a negotiating tool.
Earlier on Monday, U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the government was “pushing hard” for Gershkovich’s release and was following the case closely.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
SRINAGAR: The administration of Jammu and Kashmir Union Territory has removed the prison tag from MLA hostel Srinagar, where Kashmir’s mainstream leaders were lodged after their detention in 2019.
The UT’s Home department has de-notified MLA hostel Srinagar as subsidiary jail. It was still a prison on papers.
“In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (b) of Section 2 of the Prisoners Act, 1900(Act. No 10 of 1987, the building with the premises declared and notified as “subsidiary jail” vide notification S.0. 09 dated 14.11.2019 is hereby de-notified with immediate effect,” reads a notification issued by the Home department.
On November 14, 2019, 34 mainstream leader’s including Peoples Conference president Sajad Gani Lone, bureaucrat-turned-politician Shah Faesal and NC general secretary Ali Muhammad Sagar were lodged in MLA hostel.
They were shifted to MLA hostel due to escalating cost of their lodging at SKICC. Three days before their shifting, on November 14, 2019, the MLA hostel was notified as a subsidiary jail under the Prisoners Act-1900 which became applicable to J&K from October 31, 2019.
Hilal Akbar Lone, son of NC MP Muhammad Akbar Lone was the last person released from MLA hostel in March 2021. (KNO)
Washington: A 35-year-old man has been sentenced to 100 years of hard labour for causing the death of a 5-year-old Indian-origin girl in the US state of Louisiana in 2021, according to local media reports.
Joseph Lee Smith from Shreveport was sentenced following his conviction in January of the killing of Mya Patel, local news media outlets like KSLA News 12 and the Shreveport Times reported.
Patel was playing in a hotel room on Monkhouse Drive when a bullet entered her room and struck her in the head. Patel was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she battled for three days and was pronounced dead on March 23, 2021.
During Smith’s trial, it was revealed to the jury that Smith got into an altercation with another man in the parking lot of the Super 8 Motel.
The hotel was owned and operated at that time by Vimal and Snehal Patel, who lived in a ground-floor unit with Mya and a younger sibling.
During the altercation, Smith struck the other man with a 9-mm handgun, which discharged. The bullet missed the other man but went into the hotel room and struck Patel in the head before grazing her mother.
District Judge John D Mosely sentenced Smith to 60 years at hard labour without the benefit of probation, parole or reduction of sentence in connection with the March 2021 slaying of Mya Patel, reports said.
Smith also must serve 20 years for obstruction of justice and 20 years for aggravated battery, for separate convictions associated with Patel’s slaying. Those terms must also be served without the benefit of probation, parole or reduction of sentence, the reports said.
On Thursday, the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office said: “the terms were enhanced by Smith being a repeat felony offender and must be served consecutively, for a total of 100 years.”
Maharashtra police inspect Hindalga prison in connection with threat calls made to the office of BJP leader Nitin Gadkari
Belagavi: The Maharashtra police have conducted raids at the Hindalga prison in this district of Karnataka in connection with threat calls to Union Minister for Highways Nitin Gadkari, police sources said on Saturday.
BELAGAVI : #Maharashtra police conducted a raid on Hindalga central prison in connection with some threat calls made to the public relations office of Nitin Gadkari at #Nagpur. Police interrogated Jayesh Pujari from Mangaluru, accused in a murder case sentenced to death by court. pic.twitter.com/bFAlYuhsKG
According to police, the raid was conducted on Thursday evening. The calls were made from Hindalaga prison to the office of Gadkari in Nagpur city on March 21. The office has received three calls of threatening and extortion, the sources said.
The caller has been identified as Jayesh Poojari, an inmate of Hindalga prison. He had demanded Rs 10 crore extortion money from the minister. Gadkari will have to bear the consequences if he fails to pay up, the miscreant added. The calls were made to Gadkari’s office in the month of January also.
The team from Maharashtra seized the mobile possessed by Jayesh Poojari illegally in the prison. Security has been tightened at the office and residence of Gadkari in Nagpur.
According to police sources, two sim cards and as many mobiles were found in the prison. Nagpur police will shortly take Jayesh Poojari into custody for investigation. The accused Jayesh Poojari is convicted of life imprisonment. He was initially awarded a death sentence in connection with dacoity and murder case. Later, the punishment was reduced to life imprisonment.
Jackson’s sentence was the close of one of the earliest sagas to emerge after the Jan. 6 attack. Williams was one of the first felony defendants charged, and she was suspected at the time of stealing Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, in part because she told friends that she did.
A jury convicted Williams in December of civil disorder and resisting police but deadlocked on a charge that Williams obstructed Congress and abetted the theft of Pelosi’s laptop. Williams is on tape entering Pelosi’s conference room while other rioters took the laptop, and she encouraged them to steal it, but Williams’ lawyers contended that it was unclear if the other rioters heard her comment.
Jackson spent much of her sentencing colloquy dismantling the defense’s claim that Williams was too young or too small to be responsible for the grave offenses the government charged. The defense team leaned on Williams’ youthful demeanor and the fact that she seemed briefly confused about which building was being stormed — calling it the White House as she approached. But Jackson said any momentary confusion Williams expressed was clarified by her repeated acknowledgment of why she was there.
It was not, Jackson emphasized, “because her dizzy little head was confused about which building in Washington was which.”
Fuentes, she noted, was born the same year as Williams. People can sign up for the military at 18, she added, noting that Williams was old enough on Jan. 6 to have completed a tour of duty. John Lewis was 21 when he became a freedom fighter, Jackson added.
“She was old enough to be one of the police officers she resisted,” Jackson said.
Jackson also took on the defense’s repeated assertions about Williams’ diminutive stature, noting that figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Liz Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had all achieved prominence despite their size.
“Riley June Williams was old enough and tall enough to be held accountable for her actions,” Jackson said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
