Nirbhaya case: SC no to curative pleas

Four convicts will be hanged on Jan 22; one files mercy plea before President

Four convicts sentenced to death in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case will be hanged on January 22 at 7 AM in Tihar Jails as decreed by a Delhi court on January 7, after the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the curative petitions by two of them.

A 5-judge Bench headed by Justice N V Ramana, second seniormost judge after the Chief Justice, turned down the curative petitions of Vinay Sharma(26) and Mukesh Kumar(32) in an inchamber hearing. A curative petition is the last legal remedy available to a person.

Other members of the Bench that held the chamber hearing were Justices Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan.

In a unanimous verdict, the five judges said: "The applications for stay of execution of death sentence are also rejected. We have gone through the Curative Petitions and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out within the parameters indicated in the decision of this Court in Rupa Ashok Hurra vs. Ashok Hurra & Another, reported in 2002 (4) SCC 388. Hence, the Curative Petitions are dismissed."

Vinay and Mukesh had filed curative petitions on January 9, two days after the Delhi court issued the death warrants while two other accomplices, Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Gupta (25), did not file any curative petition.

One of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jails. A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

A 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The Supreme Court had in 2017 upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and a trial court. On July 9, 2018, it had dismissed the review pleas filed by three of the convicts in the case, saying no grounds had been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict.

Meanwhile, one of the four death row convicts, 32year-old Mukesh Kumar, has moved a mercy petition before President Kovind and also approached the Delhi High Court for quashing the death warrant. The high court is expected to take up Mukesh's petition on Wednesday.