The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the curative petition filed by Pawan Gupta, one of the four death-row convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case, against the dismissal of his petition claiming that he was a juvenile when the crime took place, Live Law reported.
Gupta and the three other convicts – Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh – are scheduled to be hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi on March 20 for raping and brutally assaulting a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in 2012. Gupta’s mercy petition was the last to have been rejected by President Ram Nath Kovind.
A six-judge bench headed by Justice NV Ramana dismissed Gupta’s petition. “The application for oral hearing is rejected,” the bench said, according to PTI. “We have gone through the curative petition and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out.”
Gupta’s lawyer AP Singh claimed that his school records prove that he was a juvenile when the crime happened. He showed his date of birth to be October 8, 1996.
In January, a three-judge bench had dismissed a Special leave petition filed against the Delhi High Court’s order that rejected his claim.
Last week, Gupta moved a Delhi court seeking the filing of cases against two constables for allegedly assaulting him in jail.
On Wednesday, Thakur, Sharma and Gupta moved a court in Delhi asking for a stay on their execution, saying that the second mercy plea of one them has been pending, reported PTI. The convicts . Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana had asked Tihar jail officials and the Delhi Police to respond to the petition, and the matter will be taken up on Thursday.
Multiple petitions by the convicts
All four convicts have filed multiple petitions over the last few months in an attempt to stall their hanging. Their mercy petitions have been rejected by President Kovind. Death warrants for them have been issued for the fourth time.
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected Singh’s petition seeking the restoration of all his legal remedies on the grounds that his former lawyer had misled him. Singh had sought the cancellation of all orders passed by courts and the rejection of his mercy petition by President Ram Nath Kovind, alleging that his lawyer Vrinda Grover had acted against his interests. On Thursday, he moved the top court against the rejection of his petition claiming he wasn’t in Delhi when the crime took place.
Thakur, Sharma and Gupta had also approached the International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands seeking a stay on their “unlawful execution”.
Sharma had approached the Delhi High Court claiming “constitutional irregularities” and procedural lapses in the rejection of his mercy petition by President Ram Nath Kovind last month. He claimed that the recommendation sent to the President to reject his mercy plea did not have Delhi Home Minister Satyendra Jain’s signature.
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