Kathmandu, June 9:

Three district courts in the Kathmandu valley are yet to collect a fine of Rs 1.52 billion and a total jail term of 6,737 years from the convicted.

According to a record, the Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur district courts have poor a verdict implementation system, meaning they cannot collect most of the fines and imprison the convicted.

The Kathmandu District Court (KDC) has not yet been able to collect Rs 1.43 billion. Verdicts ordering the imprisonment of convicts for 4,738 years has not been implemented.

The KDC collected Rs 309 million in fine and awarded the total jail term of 1,435 years to the convicted in the fiscal year 2062-63 BS.

The Bhaktapur District Court (BDC) has not been able to collect Rs 154 million. The BDC issued verdicts sentencing the culprits a jail term of 301 years, but these orders remain in paper.

The Lalitpur District Court (LDC) has not been able to collect a fine amounting to Rs 492 million and has a backlog of accumulated jail term of 1,696 years.

The BDC collected Rs 7 lakh in fine and 70-year jail term in the last fiscal. The LDC collected Rs 124 million in fine and issued verdicts, awarding the total jail term of 323 years during the same period.

“The figure is an accumulation of total fine and jail sentence slapped on the convicted from 1950 onwards,” says registrar at the Kathmandu District Court, Krishna Ram Koirala.

Explaining the reasons behind the poor implementation of court verdicts, Koirala says, “The convicted flee in some cases. Also, addresses maintained in the record are incorrect.” “The mechanism to implement the verdicts is lacking,” he says.

“Fines cannot be collected and the convicts cannot be imprisoned if the state does not adopt an appropriate mechanism. That is why, the courts verify personal addresses while lodging cases these days,” says a legal expert, Dr Shankar Kumar Shrestha.

Due to the poor implementation of the verdicts, culprits have been moving around freely. “We demand those who want to file cases to produce identity cards to make sure they do not give wrong addresses. We have been publishing names of those who have to pay over 10 million,” Koirala says.