A Delhi court will on Tuesday hear a plea by the mother of the December 16 gang-rape victim seeking directions from the court to issue death warrant against her 23-year-old daughter’s tormentors.
In the last hearing, the court had directed the Tihar jail authorities to issue a notice to the convicts informing them about the legal remedies available to them. The order had come after the judge was informed that the Supreme Court had dismissed the review petition of one the convicts – Akshay Kumar Singh.
The jail authorities had then issued a notice to the convicts on December 18 – Akshay, Vinay, Pawan and Mukesh – who are on a death row for raping the physiotherapy student in a moving bus on December 16, 2012. The jail authorities told the convicts that they have seven days to file their mercy petition.
However, replying to the notice, advocate AP Singh, representing three convicts, said that they are yet to exhaust all their legal remedies. He said that they still have the option of filing a curative petition after their review petition was dismissed by the Supreme Court. The lawyer added that the convicts cannot file a mercy petition before the President till the time all legal remedies are exhausted.
The court will now hear the matter on Tuesday when all the facts would be placed before it. On an earlier date, the prosecution had sought that the death warrant be issued against the convicts stating that the mercy petition can be filed later. It had also said that delaying tactics were being used by the convicts.
However, the court had refused to issue the warrant stating that it can’t do so before the convicts have exhausted all the legal remedies.
On Monday, another Delhi court dismissed a complaint by Heera Lal Gupta, father of Pawan Kumar Gupta (one of the convicts) who had sought perjury proceedings against the sole eye-witness, a friend of the victim, who was present with her on the day the incident took place.
The judge, while dismissing the complaint, said the same defence was also used during the trial and the court had not accepted it leading to the conviction.
The 23-year-old woman was gangraped and tortured on December 16, 2012, which led to her death. All the six accused were arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder. One of the accused was a minor and appeared before a juvenile justice court, while another accused committed suicide in Tihar Jail.
Four of the convicts were sentenced to death by a trial court in September 2013, and the verdict confirmed by the Delhi High Court in March 2014 and upheld by the Supreme Court in May 2017, which also dismissed their review petition in July 2018.
