December 16...

“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 thepresidentandapproachedthe 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 the 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 nonapplication 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 the 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 the 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?” the two-judge bench said. The court said there was no error in the lower court order that issued the death warrant for the four convicts. “If the petitioner is of the opinion that the date of execution mentioned in the impugned order needs to be set aside in view of any subsequent event, then he [Mukesh] must approach the court that passed the impugned order,” the court said.

Soon after, Kumar’s counsel moved the Patiala House Court, seeking postponement of the execution date. Additional sessions judge Satish Kumar Arora, who passed the death warrant earlier this month, sought the response of the state and the victim’s parents, and posted the matter for further hearing on Thursday.

In a related development, the Delhi government recommended rejecting the mercy plea filed by Kumar, and forwarded it to the Lieutenant Governor at a “lightning speed”, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said.

The four convicts brutally assaulted and gang-raped the young woman on a moving bus on December 16, 2012, before throwing her out of the vehicle. The woman died about two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore.

Ram Singh (35), the fifth accused in the case, committed suicide in Tihar jail in 2013. An underage person, who was convicted by a juvenile justice board in 2015, was released from a cor