New Delhi, March 28
The Supreme Court today took a serious view of 12 states, including Punjab and Haryana, for not filing replies to its notices on a petition seeking to lay down uniform guidelines by the Centre and states for the release of life convicts after the completion of 14-year sentence and directed that their home secretaries should appear on April 25.

If the home secretaries of the states failed to appear in person, they would be issued bailable warrants to secure their presence, a Bench of Justices H K Sema and V S Sirpurkar said.

The other 10 states are Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Nagaland, Meghalya and Tripura. Assam’s home secretary present in the court today was exempted from personal appearance after he made a commitment to file the affidavit during the course of the day.

A PIL was filed by M K Balakrishnan in 2003 after two petitions were moved against the then Chautala government in Haryana on the premature release of a number of life convicts in murder cases.

Though the Haryana Government had filed the reply, the court read out its name also among the 12 states which had failed to file the affidavits in the fresh petition by Balakrishnan.

Balakrishnan had said as per various judgements of the apex court, a convict should be treated to have completed the life sentence on the completion of 14-year jail term. But there were thousands of convicts languishing in jails across the country who have served more than 14 years of sentence, he had said.