Uncertainty over hanging on Jan 22
NEW DELHI: The hanging of four people convicted for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in the national capital could be delayed, after the Delhi government told the high court on Wednesday that their January 22 execution seemed unlikely because one of the men had filed a mercy plea before the President.
Citing a 2014 Supreme Court verdict as precedent, the counsels of Mukesh Kumar, 33, who challenged the death warrant on the grounds that his plea was pending, also argued that if the President rejected his petition, he should be hanged at least 14 days from the day of that decision.
The high court refused to pass an order setting aside the death warrant, but allowed Kumar to approach the trial court that ordered the execution of the four convicts. It, however, stressed that there was no error in the January 7 ruling that said the four men should be hanged at 7am on January 22. “The law is quite clear that a convict can be executed only after 14 days from the date on which mercy plea is rejected. As per the judgment in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India and the Delhi Prison Manual, it is explicit that after the rejection of mercy plea, the convict is entitled to fourteen days,” Anup Surendranath, assistant professor at National Law University Delhi, and executive director at Project 39A, told HT. On Tuesday, soon after the Supreme Court dismissed the curative petitions filed by convicts Kumar and Vinay Sharma, 27, against their death sentence, Kumar filed a mercy plea before the President and approached the high court. The other two convicts, Akshay Thakur (33), Pawan Gupta (25), are yet to file their curative petitions, considered the last legal option for a death row convict in the Supreme Court. according to prison rules, if a death penalty has been awarded to multiple persons, and even if one of them moves a mercy plea, the order of execution for others gets postponed till that plea is not decided, advocate Rahul Mehra, who appeared for the Delhi government and the prison authorities, and his associate advocate Chaitanya Gosain, told high court on Wednesday.
“Then your rule is bad if you cannot take action till all the co-convicts have moved a mercy plea. It seems there has been non-application of mind [while framing the rules]. The system is suffering from cancer,” a two-judge bench of justices Manmohan and Sangita Dhingra Sehgal said.
The court also pulled up Kumar’s counsels, senior advocate Rebecca John and advocate Vrinda Grover, for delay in availing the legal remedies soon after the Supreme Court in 2017 upheld the death sentence of all four convicts. Kumar’s plea, filed through Grover, also sought that if President rejected his plea, he should be hanged at least 14 days from the day of that decision. “We feel this is a stratagem devised on how to prolong the matter, since you had time since May 5, 2017, when apex court dismissed their appeals, to move a mercy plea or file a review or curative petition. Why did you wait till now? What restrained you from doing so? What prevented you?” two-judge bench said.