Siddharth Vashisht (born 1977), better known as Manu Sharma, is a convicted murderer, serving life imprisonment for the 1999 murder of model Jessica Lall. Sharma is the son of the former Indian minister Venod Sharma.[1] Manu Sharma is one of several high-profile criminals brought
to trial in India through media activism. Along with that of some other murderers, his conviction is viewed as demonstrating the impact of the general public in correcting imbalances in the Indian legal process.[2] Manu Sharma was born in 1977 to Venod Sharma and Shakti Rani Sharma. His father was a member of parliament in the Rajya Sabha in the 1990s, elected on a Indian National Congress ticket. He was later elected to the Haryana legislature.[1] His uncle is the son-in-law of former President of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma.[3] The family owns two sugar mills, at Indri in Haryana, and Patran in Punjab.[4] Sharma is known to be asthmatic and was given special attention in his childhood.[5] He was educated at the elite Mayo College in Ajmer, after which he was asked to leave. He then completed two years of undergraduate courses in Commerce at a college in Chandigarh.[6] Manu initially thought of completing an MBA, but he joined the family business instead. His father then directed him to manage the family mill at Bhadson in Karnal, some 150 kilometres (93 mi) away.[5] Villagers and sugarcane workers in Bhadson have alleged that Manu used his political connections and his pistols to terrorise villagers, and sometimes defaulted on payments.[5] Since the late 1990s, Sharma also built up the Picadally hotel chain[7] including the Blue Ice pub-cum-discothèque in Chandigarh (opened in 2002), and a theatre.[8] ==Murder and trial== In the late 1990s, Manu Sharma was known to be a regular party-goer in Delhi.[6] On the night of 29–30 April 1999, Sharma, along with several friends, went to a party at the Tamarind Court restaurant, a venue he knew well. They arrived around 2 am, shortly after the bar had closed. Sharma demanded that he be served a drink, and was turned down by the barmaid, Jessica Lall. After an altercation between the two, eyewitness (in their initial testimony) said that they saw him fire twice, once in the air, and one at Jessica, killing her instantly. Following a nation-wide manhunt that lasted for seven days, Manu surrendered to the police in Delhi, after securing anticipatory bail from a court in the state of Manipur.[3] In the original trial, few witnesses came forward to depose. Increasingly, revelations in the media have been piecing together the story of the pressure, bribery and coercion that led to a reversal of the case. Sharma was acquitted of all charges in February 2006. Witnesses who had originally claimed to have seen Manu Sharma shoot Jessica turned into hostile witnesses during the six years of the court case. Shortly after he was released on bail in 2003, there was a fight at the Blue Ice pub in which Manu was alleged to have been involved, but his name was later dropped from the case and the disco’s manager was booked instead.[9] After the verdict, Manu Sharma was ostracized, with SMS campaigns being sent out to boycott all establishments that the Sharmas had owned.[10] The acquittal led to widespread public outcry. In March 2006, the case was re-admitted in the Delhi High Court where it was tried on a fast-track basis. Among the evidence re-introduced were two spent cartridges recovered from Manu's car, the ballistic analysis for one of which showed it as matching the bullet recovered from Lall's skull.[11] This evidence had been overlooked by the trial court. On 18 December 2006, The High Court bench of Justice R S Sodhi and Justice P K Bhasin, in a 61-page judgement, held Manu Sharma guilty of murdering Jessica Lall and sentenced him to life imprisonment. After conviction, Manu was imprisoned in the Tihar Jail. An appeal filed in the Supreme Court of India is pending judgement . SC refuses bail to Manu Sharma Sharma was incarcerated in the Tihar Jail along with the co-accused Vikas Yadav and Amardeep Singh Gill, who had been sentenced for destroying evidence.[12] Along with another high-profile convict, Santosh Kumar Singh, Sharma is involved in helping other prisoners draft legal appeals.[13] Delhi Government granted Manu Sharma 30 days parole On September 24, Delhi Lieutenant Governor granted Manu Sharma 30-day parole from jail, on the grounds that Sharma needed to attend to his ailing mother and also look after the family business which was suffering in his absence.
