Bhubaneswar, September 17: The Odisha government has rejected the remission plea of Ravindra Pal alias Dara Singh, who is serving a life sentence for the 1999 killing of Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines and his two sons.
The State Sentence Review Board (SSRB) rejected Singh’s plea at a special meeting on August 31, the government informed the Supreme Court on Thursday.
A bench of Justices Manoj Misra and Vijay Bishnoi took note of the decision and allowed Singh’s counsel two weeks to file an appropriate amendment application challenging it. The matter will be heard after three weeks.
Singh, 63, has spent more than 25 years in prison and had sought premature release, citing his period of incarceration, remorse and the Odisha government’s 2022 premature release guidelines.
The SSRB said it was “not inclined to recommend his premature release at this stage”. His earlier remission pleas were rejected in 2016, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023.
Singh was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to death for the attack in which Staines and his sons, Philip, 11, and Timothy, 8, were burnt alive while sleeping in a vehicle at Manoharpur village in Keonjhar district in January 1999. The Orissa High Court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment in 2005, a decision upheld by the Supreme Court in 2011.
Staines and his wife Gladys were associated with the Mayurbhanj Evangelical Missionary, which worked among leprosy patients. Gladys Staines was awarded the Padma Shri in 2005.
