On Monday, a Delhi court had deferred the hanging of the four death row convicts pending disposal of Gupta’s mercy plea.
President Ram Nath Kovind on Wednesday dismissed mercy petition of Pawan Gupta, one of the convicts in the December 16, 2012, gangrape-murder case, two days after a Delhi court deferred the hanging of the four death row convicts pending disposal of Gupta’s mercy plea.
The Delhi Home department had recommended that the mercy plea of Pawan (25) be rejected. The convicts—Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) —were to be hanged together on March 3 at 6 am. This was the third time the death warrants were stayed by the court.
On Monday, the Supreme Court had rejected Pawan’s curative petition challenging the rejection of his review petition against the death sentence awarded to him.
Gupta was the only one among the convicts who had not filed a curative petition. The curative petitions filed by the other three were already dismissed.
Deferring the hanging, Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Dharmender Rana had stated the death sentence cannot be executed pending disposal of Pawan’s mercy petition before the President. “Despite stiff resistance from the victim’s side, I am of the opinion that any condemned convict must not meet his Creator with a grievance in his bosom that the courts of the country have not acted fairly in granting him an opportunity to exhaust his legal remedies,” ASJ Rana had said.
The case dates back to December 16, 2012, when a 23-year-old woman was gangraped and assaulted inside a moving bus in South Delhi by six persons, before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012 at a hospital in Singapore.