New Delhi: The Supreme Court on July 9 upheld the death sentence for three of the four convicts in the December 16, 2012, Delhi gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old woman, observing that no grounds were made out for the review of the verdict.
A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan delivered its judgment on the pleas of Mukesh (29), Pawan Gupta (22) and Vinay Sharma (23).
The 23-year-old woman was gangraped and brutally assaulted by six men inside a moving bus in south Delhi late on December 16, 2012 before being thrown out on the road. She died of her injuries 12 days later on December 29 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
“Review applications cannot be entertained… convict cannot be allowed to re-agitate the grounds of appeal. There has to be an apparent error on record to show it resulted in miscarriage of justice,” the bench said in its judgement.
“The death row convicts failed to point out ‘error’ in the judgement,” the court said. “Convicts were heard elaborately during appeals and no grounds have been made out for review of its verdict.”
The three had filed a review petition after the top court upheld their death sentences on May 5, 2017. A fourth convict, Akshay Kumar Singh (31), who was also awarded death, did not file a review petition.
The top court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the trial court and confirmed by the Delhi high court in the case that had left the country shocked and outraged.
One of the accused, Ram Singh, had allegedly committed suicide in the capital’s Tihar jail.
A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board. He was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.
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