SC dismisses plea seeking execution of Nirbhaya death row convicts within 2 weeks

The plea stated that such a delay in execution of death penalty is a bad precedent and has resulted in increasing incidents of rapes being reported on daily basis.

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a plea seeking execution within two weeks of death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case. The plea was filed by laywer Alakh Alok Srivastava who had sought a direction to the government to execute all the four death row convicts - Mukesh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay.

In his plea, Srivastava had said that despite a lapse of more than four and a half months from the date of dismissal of the review petitions of three convicts, the death penalty has not yet been executed. The plea said that in rape-cum-murder cases, the fate of the accused must be decided in a period of eight months from the lower court to the apex court. 

The plea stated that a delay in execution of death penalty is a bad precedent and has resulted in increasing incidents of rapes being reported on daily basis. It said that the delay after over five years of their initial conviction "apparently gives an impression in the minds of the rapists that they would also be harmless if they commit such heinous crimes".

The plea had also sought guidelines to prescribe strict timelines for speedy execution of death row convicts in rape-cum-murder cases, so that the remedies of appeal in high court, appeal, review, curative petition in the apex court and mercy petition before the president are exhausted by the convicts within maximum period of eight months. 

The 23-year-old paramedic student was gangraped on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 inside a running bus in South Delhi by six persons. She was severely assaulted before being thrown out on the road. She succumbed to her injuries on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The apex court had earlier on July 9 dismissed the pleas of Mukesh, Pawan, and Vinay seeking review of the SC verdict which had upheld the judgements of the Delhi High Court and the lower court awarding death penalty to them.