The Supreme Court today dismissed the curative plea filed by Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the four convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, a day before their scheduled hanging.
Gupta has now filed a mercy plea before President Ram Nath Kovind. Meanwhile, the President had already dismissed the mercy plea of three other convicts Mukesh Kumar Singh, Vinay Kumar Sharma and Akshay Thakur.
Meanewhile, Delhi’s Patiala House court today dismissed Pawan’s application seeking stay on his execution.
The 25-year-old Pawan Gupta was still left with legal option of curative petition, while rests 3 convicts Mukesh Kumar Singh, Vinay Kumar Sharma and Akshay Thakur have already exhausted their legal remedies. He filed a plea last week and urged the court to convert his death sentence to life imprisonment on the basis of his juvenility at the time of crime.
The Supreme Court had earlier in January, rejected Gupta’s claim of being a minor in 2012 when the brutal incident happened. This was the second time in two weeks that the court had rejected Gupta’s claim of being a minor.
The bench of justices NV Ramana, Arun Mishra, RF Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan considered the curative petition in the chamber of Justice Ramana. The bench said that no case is made out for re-examining the conviction and the punishment of the convict.
Convicts Mukesh Kumar Singh and Vinay Kumar Sharma had earlier challenged the rejection of their mercy petitions in the SC, which was rejected by the top court. Akshay Thakur has also not challenged the rejection of his mercy petition till now.
The brutal gangrape and murder case in which the four convicts are sentenced is of December 16, 2012, when a paramedic student was brutally gangraped by a group of five men on a moving bus. The sixth convict was a juvenile. Later the victim succumbed to her injuries in the hospital.
One of the accused was a minor and appeared before a juvenile justice court, while another accused committed suicide in Tihar Jail. The four 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 in May 2017 by the Supreme Court, which also dismissed their review petitions.