‘They will be hanged’, says Delhi gangrape victim’s mother as Supreme Court hears convicts’ curative petition

INDIA - The mother of Delhi gangrape victim said on Tuesday that she is hopeful of the curative petition of the two convicts in the case will be dismissed. “They (convicts) have filed a petition (curative plea) before the Supreme Court just to stall the process. I’m very hopeful that their petition will be rejected today. They’ll be hanged on 22nd January & Nirbhaya will get justice,” said Asha Devi, according to news agency ANI.

Her remarks come on a day when a fivejudge bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justices N V Ramana, Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan will hear curative petitions of two of the four death-row convicts in the Delhi gangrape case. The curative pleas were filed by Vinay Sharma (26) and Mukesh Singh (32) in the top court last week. Two other convicts on death row convicts in the case, Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Gupta (25) have not filed curative petitions. Curative petitions are decided in-chambers by the judges. It is the last and final legal remedy available to a death row convict.

A Delhi court had issued death warrants against the four convicts and set January 22 as the date for their hanging at Delhi’s Tihar jail. The court also set the time of 7 am to carry ut the sentence. In his curative petition Vinay Sharma said that the collective conscience of society to send a person to gallows was erroneous. The four were among six people who gangraped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old paramedic student on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi before throwing her out on the road. She died on December 29 in a Singapore hospital.

In 2017, the Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence awarded to them by a trial court and endorsed by the Delhi High Court. Out of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail while a juvenile was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term. On July 9, 2018, the apex court 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.

(Hindustan Times)