Lance Naik Devendranath Rai was 33 years old when he was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering two colleagues while posted in Mathura in 1991.

Today, as a 60-year-old, he is still lodged in Naini Jail in Allahabad.

In the last 27 years, he did not get a single day’s parole to visit his family. Rai’s wife, through senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, narrated the Armyman’s pitiable story on Friday before a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, which sought responses from the Centre and the Uttar Pradesh government as well as Naini Jail authorities.

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