Delhi Court Refuses to Stay Nirbhaya Convicts’ Execution Tomorrow; Pawan Gupta’s Counsel Files Another Mercy Petition

Pawan Gupta, one of the death row convicts, has filed mercy petition before the President, his lawyer A P Singh said. The lawyer said he filed the plea after getting information that the Supreme Court had dismissed Gupta's curative petition.

New Delhi: Soon after the Supreme Court rejected the curative plea of one of the four death row convicts, Pawan Kumar Gupta, in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, the Patiala House Court rejected a petition seeking a delay in the execution of the four convicts, scheduled to be hanged on March 3 at 6 AM.

Reacting over the development Nirbhaya’s mother said,”They have wasted the court’s time and tried to subvert system. I am hopeful that they will be hanged tomorrow.”

The lawyer representing Nirbhaya also expressed her happiness and said that the way rapists were trying to manipulate law, now ends.

Meanwhile, Pawan Gupta, one of the death row convicts, has filed mercy petition before the President, his lawyer A P Singh said. The lawyer said he filed the plea after getting information that the Supreme Court had dismissed Gupta’s curative petition.

2012 Delhi gangrape case: Advocate AP Singh has informed Delhi's Patiala House Court that death row convict Pawan's mercy petition has been filed before the President. https://t.co/TzPkDdfzvi

— ANI (@ANI) March 2, 2020

On February 17, a fourth death warrant was issued for the four convicts — Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh, which orders their hanging at 6 AM on March 3 at Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

The first date of execution, January 22, was postponed to Feb 1 by a January 17 court order.Then the trial court, on January 31, stayed, ’till further orders’ the execution of the four convicts as they had not exhausted all their legal remedies.

What happened on Dec 16, 2012?

On the intervening night of December 16 and December 17, 2012, Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old paramedic student, was brutally gang-raped and assaulted inside a moving bus near nationa capital’s Munirka area by six persons before being dumped on the road. Two weeks later on December 29, she succumbed to her injuries in a Singapore hospital.

Within 48 hours of the crime, the Delhi police arrested all the six accused and charged them with sexual assault and murder. While the prime accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide inside Tihar Jail, one of the convicts, a minor, who was just short of 18 when the crime took place appeared before the juvenile justice court and released after three years in a reform home.