On Tuesday, the Karnataka government approached the Supreme Court by way of a special leave petition, challenging the verdict of the Karnataka High Court which led to the acquittal of the AIADMK chief, J Jayalalithaa, in a disproportionate assets (DA) case. The High Court had overruled the decision of the trial court which had sentenced her to an imprisonment of four years. The acquittal, however, had paved the way for the AIADMK supremo to return as the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu.
The government submitted that the High Court had underestimated various items possessed by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and had thus made a mathematical error while assessing her income from various stakes she owned. While pleading for prompt stay on the acquittal order of the High Court, the Karnataka government stated that if the fault committed by the High Court was corrected, then the percentage of the disproportionate assets of Jayalalithaa would be 34.50%, which was mistakenly determined at 8.12% by the Court. Further, the filed petition addressed the acquittal to be a “gross miscarriage of justice”. The government of Karnataka has further challenged the acquittal of her associates (V K Sasikala, J Illavarasi and V N Sudhakaran) as well in the Supreme Court.
It was put forth in the petition that the reasoning employed in the case of Agnihotri did not apply in the present case, as the assets here ran up to the amount in crores. The precedent set by the case of Agnihotri was that there would be no consideration of an offence if the disproportionate assets are found to be less than 10 per cent of the total income.