New Delhi: 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 minor sons.
The decision was taken by the State Sentence Review Board (SSRB) at a special meeting on August 31. The Odisha government informed the Supreme Court about the decision on Thursday.
A bench of Justices Manoj Misra and Vijay Bishnoi granted Singh’s counsel two weeks to file an amendment application challenging the rejection. The case will be heard after three weeks.
Singh, 63, has spent more than 25 years in Kendujhar district jail. He had approached the Supreme Court in 2024 seeking premature release, stating that he had completed over 24 years of actual imprisonment and had expressed remorse for his actions.
His earlier remission requests were rejected in 2016, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023.
Singh was convicted by a CBI court in 2003 and initially sentenced to death. The Orissa High Court converted the sentence to life imprisonment in 2005, and the Supreme Court upheld the decision in 2011.
Staines and his sons, Philip and Timothy, were killed after their vehicle was set on fire at Manoharpur village in Kendujhar in January 1999.