Nirbhaya gangrape: Supreme Court to continue hearing over convicts’ appeals

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The Supreme Court on Monday will continue the hearing over the appeals filed by the four convicts in the brutal Nirbhaya gang rape case of December 16th 2012. The convicts – Akshay, Pawan, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh – have challenged the Delhi High Court order which had sentenced them to the gallows, after keeping in view the fact that it was a rarest of the rare case. Earlier also the trial court had sentenced all the four convicts to death penalty. The matter is now at present being heard by the Apex Court bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra and Justices R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan.

On February 3rd, the Supreme Court accepted Amicus Curiae Raju Ramachandran’s submissions that there has been violation of procedure with regard to the sentencing of the four convicts. The accused are required to file their affidavits by February 23. Six people gang-raped a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern in a moving bus and thrashed her and her male friend in the national capital. They then violently raped and attacked her, and threw both of them from the moving bus.

The woman succumbed to her injuries in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012. One of the accused, Ram Singh hanged himself in prison, while another man, who was a juvenile at the time of the crime, was convicted in August and will serve the maximum sentence of three years in a reform home.

On December 3, amicus curiae Sanjay Hegde questioned the evidence produced by the prosecution in the gang-rape case, and came out with certain points putting a question on the merit of evidence. According to Hegde, one of the convicts, Mukesh, was not with the prime culprit Ram Singh when the offence was committed, since their mobile locations were found to be different on that night.