The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the death penalty of three men convicted of raping and murdering a woman in New Delhi in December 2012, reported ANI.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan dismissed the review petition filed by Mukesh, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma to reduce their death penalty to a life sentence. The fourth death row convict, Akshay Kumar Singh, did not file a review petition.
The court said a review was possible only if there was an error or a miscarriage of justice, reported The Hindu. Convicts cannot be allowed to re-argue a case in the guise of a review plea, said the court.
Six men had raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old student in a moving bus in Delhi on December 16, 2012. The woman succumbed to her injuries two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore. A minor convict was released in December 2015 after serving three years in a detention home for juveniles, while one convict died in prison.
On May 5, 2017, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict of the Delhi High Court and the trial court awarding capital punishment to the four other convicts.
In January, the Supreme Court gave two convicts – Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma – more time to file responses in connection with their review petition against the death penalty. On May 4, the Supreme Court reserved its verdict on the plea. The convicts had argued through their lawyer AK Singh that they should be spared the death sentence as it amounted to “cold-blooded killing in the name of justice”.
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