Court upholds death penalty for ‘diabolical’ rape
NEW DELHI: India’s Supreme Court yesterday rejected pleas to review the capital sentences of three assailants involved in the gang rape and murder of a young college student that shook India in 2012.
In May last year, India’s highest court upheld the 2013 death penalty verdicts for four of the six who gang-raped and tortured a 23-yearold student in India’s capital, saying they did not deserve leniency due to their “brutal, barbaric and diabolical” conduct.
The attack prompted widespread protests and sparked a new debate about women’s safety in India, resulting in strict changes to the country’s rape laws which now allow for the death penalty in some cases.
Yesterday, the court rejected the review petition of three of the six assailants – Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma, all in their twenties – who had asked the court to consider commuting their death sentence to life imprisonment.
The convicted assailants have not yet exhausted all legal options – they can still seek a curative petition from the court – so the process may drag out for years. The fourth assailant has not yet filed a review plea.
A lawyer for the men, AP Singh, told reporters at the courthouse after the verdict that “injustice” had been done to the convicted murderers – using the Hindi word for “boys” to describe them – and the court had caved in to public and political pressure to uphold the death penalty.
India has long exercised the death penalty as punishment for serious crimes. Its last execution was in 2015, of Yakub Memon for his role in the 1993 terrorist bombings in Mumbai.
The young woman’s parents, Asha Devi and Badrinath Singh, applauded the court’s decision but said they had been waiting too long for a resolution.
“I want that as soon as possible they are hanged to death,” Devi said in an interview. “There’s no word to describe what I’m going through. First to lose your child and then go through all this.”
Their daughter – a physical therapy student who became known as “Nirbhaya”, which means “fearless” – had gone to see the movie Life of Pi with a male friend on the night of December 16, 2012, when they boarded a private bus home.
The men – who court documents said were drunk, cruising and looking for sex – attacked and tortured the couple and raped the young woman with an iron rod before tossing the pair from the bus. The young man survived but the woman died later.