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Delhi court stays execution of Nirbhaya convicts until further orders

The four convicts were scheduled to be hanged on March 3 at 6 AM.

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A Delhi court on Monday stayed the execution of all four individuals convicted in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder case (aka the Nirbhaya case). The matter has been deferred until further orders.

The four convicts on death row are Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, and Akshay Thakur.

The four convicts were scheduled to be hanged on March 3 at 6 AM. The Delhi High Court had earlier said that all the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case have to hanged together and not separately.

All four convicts, however, have exhausted their mercy plea. Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court had dismissed a petition by Pawan Kumar Gupta, seeking a stay in the execution of the death warrant that was issued last month. Following this, the convict's lawyer AP Singh had argued that the execution cannot be carried out till the plea is pending with the President. However, the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, had also rejected the mercy petition of Gupta later on Monday.

Following the stay on executions today, Nirbhaya's mother Asha Devi said, "Why is the court taking so much time to execute its own order to hang the convicts? Repeated postponing of the execution shows the failure of our system. Our entire system supports criminals."

Asha Devi has been fighting a long and difficult legal battle for over seven years, determined to see the criminals hanged. To be precise, it took more than seven years for her to even see something close to the light of justice, but even then that ray of hope keeps getting deferred.

Why the legal system in this country is so wound-up that it takes such an abnormally long time to close a case, even after the establishment of a fast-track court for the proceedings, remains up for investigation later.

The date of execution, first fixed for January 22 in Tihar jail, was postponed for 6 AM on February 1 by a January 17 court order. The trial court later, on January 31 stayed, "till further orders" the execution of the four convicts in the case, who are lodged in Tihar Jail.

However, legal experts have noted that owing to the judicial procedures provided under India's legal system, it is possible that the death row convicts are delaying their ultimate fate by filing petitions and counter-petitions successively.

The 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, who came to be known as 'Nirbhaya' (fearless), was gang-raped and savagely assaulted on the night of December 16, 2012, in a moving bus in South Delhi. She died of her injuries a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital.

The incident generated tremendous public outroar and media coverage demanding justice for the victim.

The accused in the case - Akshay Kumar, Pawan Gupta, Mukesh Singh, Ram Singh, Vinay Sharma, and a minor boy - were promptly arrested under charges of sexual assault and murder.

In 2013, one of the accused, Ram Singh, died in police custody of possible suicide, allegedly committing suicide by hanging himself in Tihar jail days after the trial began.

All of the remaining accused were convicted by a fast-track trial court of rape and murder and while the juvenile, who was said to be the most brutal of the attackers, was given the maximum sentence of three years imprisonment at a reform facility, the rest were sentenced to death by hanging. Subsequently, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court upheld this judgment.

The juvenile was released in 2015 and sent to an undisclosed location amid concerns over a threat to his life. He, when released, was 20 years old.

 

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