Nirbhaya Case: Top Court Confirms Death Penalty For Convict
NEW DELHI : The Top Court today confirmed the death sentence of one of the four convicts in the 2012 gang-rape, torture and killing of a young medical student known to the world as ‘Nirbhaya’ or fearless, saying there was no ground to review the verdict.
Asha Devi, Nirbhaya’s mother, has said she is “very happy” with the Supreme Court’s confirmation of the death sentence for one of the four convicts in the in the 2012 gang-rape, torture and killing of her daughter.”It is good and we have gone a step closer,” she told minutes after the top court issued its order.
Convict Akshay Singh can plead for mercy before the President of India within one week, the judges said.”Review petition is not re-hearing of appeal over and over again,” a three-judge bench said, dismissing the last such petition in the case.
The convict had questioned the woman’s dying declaration and argued in court that he deserved mercy as the “pressure to implicate him had been overlooked” and there had been inefficiency to catch the “real perpetrators”.
“The convict doesn’t deserve any lenience. God would feel ashamed of creating such a monster. There are certain crimes where ‘humanity cries’ and this case is one of them,” said Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, contesting the convict’s petition. There was media and public pressure to implicate Akshay Singh, the convict’s lawyer AP Singh argued as his petition was heard by three judges.
The convicts, except Akshay Kumar Singh, can still file curative pleas in the top court against their conviction and death penalty in the case. After exhausting the remedy of filing curative pleas, the convicts can send their mercy pleas to the President.In case the pleas are dismissed, the authorities can seek death warrants from a local court to execute them.
He also said that convicts in the Nirbhaya case are making concerted efforts to “delay the inevitable” and the law must take its own course as soon as possible. Advocate AP Singh, appearing for the convict, had told the court that the age of citizens in Delhi-NCR is reducing due to air and water pollution and there was no need to award death penalty to the convict.
Claiming “new facts”, convict Akshay Singh’s lawyer also said a CBI inquiry was never carried out in the case and referred to the case of the killing of a Delhi schoolboy in which a bus conductor first arrested by the police was cleared by the CBI. A new bench heard the review petition after Chief Justice S A Bobde recused himself on Tuesday, saying one of his relatives had represented Nirbhaya.
The review petitions of the three other convicts, Mukesh, 30, Pawan Gupta, 23, and Vinay Sharma, 24, had been dismissed earlier. Of the six accused of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder, four were convicted, Ram Singh committed suicide and a juvenile was released after three years in a reform home.
The 23-year-old paramedic student was gang raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 inside a moving bus in south Delhi by six persons before being dumped on a road, naked and critically injured. She died on December 29 in Singapore.
Akshay, in his petition, argues that Delhi is a “gas chamber” and a person’s life-span is becoming shorter anyway. “Everyone is aware of what is happening in Delhi-NCR with regard to water and air. Life is becoming short, then why death penalty,” he says.
(Wth Agency Inputs).
