The Delhi High Court on Wednesday declined to hear a plea seeking direction to the National Human Rights Commission to assess the mental and physical health of the four convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case, PTI reported.

A bench comprising Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice C Hari Shankar said the plea was not maintainable because it was not first moved by the National Human Rights Commission.

On Monday, a court in Delhi stayed the execution of the four convicts – Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Singh and Pawan Gupta – who were scheduled to be hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi on Tuesday at 6 am.

Advertisement

Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana deferred the matter after one of the convicts, Pawan Gupta, filed a mercy petition before President Ram Nath Kovind earlier in the day. His lawyer had requested the court to stop the execution citing the petition.

The four convicts were given the death penalty – first by a trial court in September 2013, which was upheld by the Delhi High Court six months later and the Supreme Court in May 2017.

The death warrants were first issued for January 22, and then postponed to February 1 because of the mercy pleas filed by two of the convicts. Gupta was the only one among the four convicts who had not availed of the legal remedies. His counsel had told a sessions court in Delhi earlier this that he could not avail any legal remedy as his earlier lawyer did not meet him during the seven-day period granted by the Delhi High Court.

The four men, along with two others, raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012. The woman succumbed to her injuries two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore. The gangrape triggered huge protests in the Capital and across the country. One convict died in prison, while a minor convict was sent to a detention home for juveniles and was released in December 2015.