Gujarat High Court Suspends Sentence of Pratapbhai alias Shiva Solanki in Murder Case of RTI Activist Amit Jethwa

A division bench of the Gujarat High Court on February 6 suspended the sentence of Pratapbhai alias Shiva Solanki, convicted of murdering RTI activist Amit Jethwa in 2010. Solanki, nephew of former BJP MP Dinu Solanki, was sentenced to life imprisonment along with six others in a conspiracy. The court's decision to suspend the sentence came as the appeals against the conviction remain pending before the Gujarat High Court. The bench also released Shiva on bail, imposing a condition that he not enter the local limits of Una taluka for a year.

Key Takeaways:

The Gujarat High Court has suspended the sentence of Pratapbhai alias Shiva Solanki, convicted of murdering RTI activist Amit Jethwa in 2010.
Solanki was sentenced to life imprisonment along with six others in a conspiracy, including his uncle, Dinu Solanki, a former BJP MP.
The court's decision to suspend the sentence was made due to the appeals against the conviction remaining pending before the Gujarat High Court.
The division bench of Justices S H Vora and Mauna Bhatt also released Shiva on bail, imposing a condition that he not enter the local limits of Una taluka for a year.
The court found prima facie that the conviction recorded by the CBI court was erroneous due to the breach of principles settled by the Hon'ble Apex Court with regard to circumstantial evidence.
Shiva has been incarcerated for seven years, 11 months, and 14 days, and the court deemed it fit to consider the application for suspension of sentence "principally, on the ground of parity."
The prosecution case rests on circumstantial evidence, and the judgment of conviction mainly rests on the depositions of four witnesses.
The court found inconsistencies in the deposition of one of the four witnesses, named Rama Haja, which makes the conviction vulnerable.

Statistics:

7 years, 11 months, and 14 days: duration of Shiva's incarceration before the court's decision to suspend sentence.
923: number of older criminal appeals against conviction pending in the court.
4: number of witnesses whose depositions formed the foundation of the conviction.
1: the year in which the murder of RTI activist Amit Jethwa took place.
6: number of people sentenced to life imprisonment along with Shiva Solanki.

Sources:

Express News Service
Gujarat High Court