The Supreme Court has accepted Deputy Registrar Anup Surendranath's resignation, which was triggered by the execution of 1993 Mumbai bombing convict Yakub Memon on 30 July, PTI reports.
Surendranath had, in a Facebook post, said that he was thinking of stepping down from his post for long and the events that followed Yakub Memon's hanging acted as the "proverbial final nail".
"I have been contemplating this for a while now for a variety of reasons, but what was played out this week at the Supreme Court was the proverbial final nail – I have resigned from my post at the Supreme Court to focus on death penalty work at the University," he wrote in the post.
"It is in many ways liberating to to regain the freedom to write whatever I want and I hope to make full use of that in the next few days to discuss the events that transpired at the Supreme Court this week," he added.
Surendranath is a professor at the National Law University, Delhi, and the Director of Death Penalty Research Project. He was also among those lawyers who had filed the petition seeking a stay on Yakub Memon's execution.
In another post that he wrote on 30 July, a few hours after Yakub Memon's hanging, Surendranath describes the hearing that started on 29 July late night and lasted till 5 am on 30 July as a case of "judicial abdication" that must be counted among the "darkest hours" of the apex court.
"It would be silly and naive to see the events of the last 24 hours at the Supreme Court as some triumph of the rule of law – the two orders at 4pm on 29th July and 5am on 30th July (and the reasoning adopted therein) are instances of judicial abdication that must count amongst the darkest hours for the Supreme Court of India," he wrote.
Yakub Memon was hanged to death on Thursday morning after his lawyers and senior SC lawyer Prashant Bhushan failed to seek commutation of his death sentence in the overnight unprecedented hearing.
His hanging sparked a nationwide debate as it divided not only ordinary Indians, but also the judiciary. While one section condemned the hanging, another supported it.
Yakub was awarded death sentence by a TADA court in 2006 for financing the execution of 13 serial blasts on 12 March in 1993 in Mumbai that left at least 257 people and over 700 injured.
