New Delhi: Hours after Vinay Kumar Sharma, another death-row convict Mukesh also filed a curative petition in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case. The curative petition, the last legal remedy available to a convict, was filed before the execution of the four convicts scheduled for January 22.
Advocate Vrinda Grover, who is the amicus curiae in the case, filed the petition on Mukesh's behalf.
On Tuesday, a Delhi court issued death warrants against Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and said they will be hanged on January 22 at 7 am in Tihar jail.
The four are likely to be shifted to Jail No. 3 in Tihar on Friday, said a senior jail official. Currently, three convicts are lodged in Jail No. 2 and one in Jail No. 4.
The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before being thrown out on the road.She died on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
On July 9, 2018, the apex court had dismissed the review pleas filed by the other three convicts in the case, saying no grounds have been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict. One of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail here.
A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term. The top court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and the trial court.
Sharma, in his curative petition filed on Thursday, alleged systematic bias against the poor and appealed for rehearing in an open court by the senior-most judges of the Supreme Court.
Sharma cited the Jessica Lall murder case where the accused Siddharth Vashisht/Manu Sharma was given life imprisonment and not the death sentence despite it being a "brutal and unprovoked murder of a defenceless woman".
In his curative plea, Sharma said his young age has been erroneously rejected as a mitigating circumstance. "The impugned judgment is bad in law as subsequent judgments of apex court have definitely changed the law on death sentence in India allowing several convicts similarly placed as him to have their death sentence commuted to life imprisonment," it said.
The petition also said that after pronouncement of the apex court's judgment in 2017, there have been as many as 17 cases involving rape and murder in which various three-judge benches of the top court have commuted the death sentence.
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