A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the curative petition filed by Delhi gang rape convict Akshay Kumar Singh. The bench, led by Justice NV Ramana, also turned down the death row convict’s request to stay his execution.
“The application for oral hearing is rejected. The application for stay of execution of death sentence is also rejected. We have gone through the curative petitions and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out within the parameters indicated in the decision of this court… Hence the curative petitions are dismissed,” the five judges who considered the curative petition said in their brief verdict.
The concept of a curative petition was evolved in 2002 by a Supreme Court judgment to cure any defect that may lead to gross miscarriage of justice in the top court’s verdict.
Akshay Kumar Singh is one of the four men convicted for the gang rape and murder of the 23-year-old paramedic student in 2012.
The four convicts, Mukesh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay, were convicted and sentenced to death by the trial court in 2013. Their conviction and sentence were confirmed by the Delhi high court in 2014 and the Supreme Court in May 2017. Subsequently, the review petitions filed by Mukesh, Pawan and Vinay against the Supreme Court judgment were dismissed in 2018 and Akshay’s review petition was dismissed in December 2019.
The four men have been ordered to be executed on 1 February at 6 am. But hours before the Supreme Court rejected Akshay Kumar Singh’s curative petition, the lawyer for the four convicts had approached a Delhi Court to request the judge to cancel their hanging because one of them had filed a mercy petition.
