Legal fight to save convicts went on till 2.30am

nNEW DELHI: The four convicts in the December 2012 Delhi rapeand-murder spent a restless night trying to avoid death before they were finally hanged at dawn on Friday.

Their lawyer knocked on the doors of the high court and the Supreme Court in the night after a trial court threw out their last attempt to put off the execution.

At 9pm on Thursday, three of the four convicts—akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma—moved the Delhi high court, challenging an order by the trial court that had earlier in the day rejected their plea for a stay on the execution. The fourth convict was Mukesh Singh.

Their advocate AP Singh, with a battery of lawyers, reached the court where justice Manmohan and justice Sanjeev Narula started hearing the matter at 10pm.

The hearing went on past midnight. The victim’s parents were at the hearing, looking tense but confident.

Singh contended that several of the convicts’ pleas were still pending. He said a plea contending that Gupta was a juvenile when the crime was committed was pending adjudication. He also read out excerpts from a book by a former Tihar Jail official who advanced the theory that Ram Singh, one of the six accused of the gang rape and fatal assault of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on December 16, 2012,, may not have taken his own life, as had been claimed.

“Three courts have applied their mind. The President has applied his mind... Present at least one legal point,” the bench said.

When advocate Singh contended that he was facing problems in filing pleas because of of the shutdown in the wake of Covid-19, the court said: “We are hearing you at 11 in the night. How can you say that the courts are inaccessible?”

Soon after it dismissed the plea, Singh went to the Supreme Court registrar for an urgent mentioning of the matter. Later, at 2.30am, a special hearing was conducted before a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court challenging the rejection of the plea by the high court.

“We are not inclined to entertain the plea,” the bench comprising justice R Banumathi, justice Ashok Bhushan and justice AS Bopanna said. Minutes before the hearing at the apex court, Singh staged a sit-in after three of his lawyers were not allowed at the hearing.

Advocate Singh cited the school certificates of Pawan Gupta to claim that he was a juvenile in December 2012, when the crime was committed. But the judges told him that he had already made this argument and it had been rejected.

“We are of the opinion that there is no merit in the case,” justice Bhanumati said, dictating the order after a 45-minute hearing.

I came home, folded my hands in front of my daughter’s photo and hugged it, telling her that justice has finally been served...i cannot forget the state in which I saw my daughter... she struggled to survive but failed.

ASHA DEVI , mother of December 16 gang rape and murder victim