NEW DELHI, DEC 17
A Bench of the Supreme Court comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) S.A. Bobde and Justices R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan, will hear a mercy plea by Akshay Kumar, one of the convicts in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case (aka the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder incident) at 2 p.m. today.
After the 23-year-old psychotherapy intern, dubbed ‘Nirbhaya’, was brutally gang-raped and murdered in Munirka, a neighbourhood in South Delhi on December 16, 2012, the incident generated tremendous public anger and media coverage demanding justice for the victim. The accused in the case – Akshay, Pawan Gupta, Mukesh Singh, Ram Singh, Vinay Sharma, and a minor boy – were arrested under charges of sexual assault and murder. In 2013, one of the accused, Ram Singh, died in police custody of possible suicide. All of the remaining accused was convicted by a fast-track trial court of rape and murder, and while the juvenile 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.
Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma, and Mukesh Singh had filed a review petition to the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision of upholding the judgment, which was refused. This year, a mercy petition filed in the name of Vinay Sharma was also sent to the President, who the central government recommended that he turned it down. However, Sharma later said that the mercy plea was not signed by him in the first place and urged the President to return it.
This was a brief history of the case proceedings so far. Today afternoon, the Supreme Court will hear the review petition filed by Akshay Kumar, the other convict in the case. He has made bizarre arguments in his petition, which cites the Vedas and the Puranas to make a case for his acquittal in the case, and said that Kumar should not be charged guilty and sentenced to death when the air pollution in Delhi was killing people anyway.
