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HomeIndiaGovernanceSupreme Court dismisses petitions seeking review of death penalty for December 2012...

Supreme Court dismisses petitions seeking review of death penalty for December 2012 rapist-killers

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Three of four living adult convicts had petitioned the court after it upheld their death sentence last year.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court Monday dismissed the review petitions filed by three of the four convicts sentenced to death for the 16 December 2012 Delhi gang rape, citing insufficient grounds.

It made no further observations, saying all had been laid out in its verdict upholding the death sentence in May last year.

Mukesh, 29, Vinay Sharma, 23 and Pawan, 22, accused of raping and brutalising a 23-year-old paramedic student along with three others, had appealed against the death penalty awarded to them. The fourth convict, Akshay Kumar Singh, 31, did not file a review petition, while the fifth committed suicide in jail in 2013. The sixth was a minor at the time, and has since been released.

The crime occurred on 16 December 2012, when the student and a male friend boarded a bus the convicts had taken out for a joyride. After almost two weeks, the victim succumbed to her injuries at a Singapore hospital where she was flown in a last-ditch bid to save her life.

The gang rape caused uproar in the national capital with lakhs turning up on the streets to protest the lack of women’s safety in India.

The rapists

The five men and the (then) minor were apprehended and stood trial. While one accused, Ram Singh, killed himself in jail on 11 March 2013, the remaining four were awarded death penalty by a Delhi court on 10 September, 2013. The minor was tried in juvenile court and remanded to shelter home for three years before he was released in December 2015.

On 5 May 2017 a full bench comprising Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra along with justices R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan upheld the death penalty amid spontaneous applause.

“Where a crime is committed with extreme brutality and the collective conscience of the society is shocked, courts must award death penalty, irrespective of their personal opinion as regards desirability of the death penalty. By not imposing a death sentence in such cases, the courts may do injustice to the society at large,” Banumathi had said in the judgment.

The 429-page judgment was a scathing indictment of the level of women’s safety in the country. The judgment noted the “brutal, barbaric and demonic” manner with which the gang-rape was committed.

“It is absolutely obvious that the accused persons had found an object for enjoyment in her and, as is evident, they were obsessed with the singular purpose sans any feeling to ravish her as they liked, treat her as they felt and, if we allow ourselves to say, the gross sadistic and beastly instinctual pleasures came to the forefront when they, after ravishing her, thought it to be just a matter of routine to throw her along with her friend out of the bus and crush them,” CJI Misra noted.

Reactions to the case

The gang rape induced several knee jerk reactions from the State and the polity. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the Justice Verma Committee was constituted to look into amending relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Interestingly, the committee was opposed to the death penalty as a punishment – even in the rarest of the rare cases. However, the Centre amended the rape law to introduce the death penalty as the maximum punishment in gang rape cases.

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1 COMMENT

  1. The Perpetrators have used the justice system to gain a reprieve for about 6 years now. They still have another plea for review, which might take another 6 years. If that too goes against them, they will STILL have an option to request for a Presidential mercy, which might take an indeterminate amount of time, if forthcoming. By all estimations, even if Presidential mercy is denied, NIRBHAYA would perhaps not receive justice for another decade. Meanwhile, RAPES continue unabated.

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