scorecardresearch
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Support Our Journalism
HomeIndiaGovernanceSupreme Court to decide on death penalty in 2012 Delhi gangrape case...

Supreme Court to decide on death penalty in 2012 Delhi gangrape case today

Follow Us :
Text Size:

Four of the six men who raped and tortured a 23-year-old paramedic student have appealed against the death penalty.

New Delhi: Over five and a half years after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case shook the conscience of the nation, the Supreme Court will decide Monday whether the four men responsible for this heinous crime must be hanged.

Akshay Kumar Singh, 31, Mukesh, 29, Vinay Sharma, 23 and Pawan, 22, four of the six men who raped a 23-year-old paramedic student, have appealed against the death penalty that was awarded to them. The fifth convict committed suicide in jail in 2013 while the sixth one was a minor at the time.

On 16 December 2012, the six convicts raped and brutalised the student in a moving bus she had boarded in South Delhi with a male friend. After almost two weeks, the victim succumbed to her injuries in 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-paged 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.

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube, Telegram & WhatsApp

Support Our Journalism

India needs fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism, packed with on-ground reporting. ThePrint – with exceptional reporters, columnists and editors – is doing just that.

Sustaining this needs support from wonderful readers like you.

Whether you live in India or overseas, you can take a paid subscription by clicking here.

Support Our Journalism

1 COMMENT

  1. We all value the sanctity of human life, respect the ethical opposition of many to the death penalty. However, by any standard of rarest of the rare, this case, in all its dimension, including women’s safety, clearly calls for capital punishment.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular