New Delhi: One of the convicts in the Nirbhaya case on Thursday filed a curative petition before the Supreme Court against the death sentence. A curative petition is the last legal recourse available to a convict and it is generally considered in-chamber.
Convict Vinay Sharma’s advocate A.P. Singh filed the curative petition in the Supreme Court and sought a stay on the death penalty. A trial court has issued a death warrant against four convicts-Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and with this, they will be hanged on January 22 at 7 am in Tihar jail.
In the petition, the lawyer said the SC should have considered that Vinay was only 19 years old at the time of the incident and since the SC had in the past commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment in 17 other cases of rape and murder, including that of minors, the same relief should be granted to Vinay.
On September 10, 2013, all four were found guilty of rape, murder, unnatural offences and destruction of evidence. On March 13, 2014, the Delhi high court confirmed their death sentence. On May 5, 2017, the Supreme Court rejected their appeal and upheld the death sentence. Even, the review petitions filed by the convicts have been dismissed by the Supreme Court.
The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, 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 thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
