Delhi gangrape case: Supreme Court stays death sentence of two convicts
New Delhi: The execution of the death sentence passed on two of the four convicts in the December 16 gangrape and murder case was on Saturday stayed till March 31 by the Supreme Court. The order came days after the Delhi High Court upheld the capital punishment awarded by the trial court.
“We stay the execution of Mukesh and Pawan till March 31, 2014,” a bench comprising Justices Ranja-na Prakash Desai and Shiva Kirti Singh said in an urgent hearing on a holiday. The bench, which considered the plea of Mukesh and Pawan Gupta, said, “We direct the registry to communicate the order to prison (Tihar Jail) authorities forthwith.”
The bench also directed the registry to place the matter before the Chief Justice of India within eight days for allocating it to the appropriate bench. The petition seeking a stay of execution was moved by advocate M.L. Sharma. When the bench wanted to know whether he was appearing for all four convicts, Mr Sharma said he was representing only Mukesh and Pawan. Besides Mukesh ,27, and Pawan ,20, the High Court had also upheld the conviction and death penalties of Akshay Thakur, 29 and Vinay Sharma, 21.
While dismissing their appeals, the HC had termed the offence as “extremely fiendish” and “unparalleled in the history of criminal jurisprudence” and had said “exemplary punishment” was the need of the hour. It also said if this case was not “the rarest of rare cases” then “there is likely to be none”.
The victim, a 23-year-old paramedic, was brutally assaulted and gangraped by six persons in a moving bus in South Delhi in the night of December 16, 2012, and then thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.
The prime accused in the case, Ram Singh, was found dead in Tihar Jail in March last year while the sixth accused, a juvenile at the time of the crime, was on August 31, 2013, convicted and sentenced to a maximum of three years in a reformation home.
