New Delhi: A second curative petition against the death sentence awarded to the convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case was filed Thursday in the Supreme Court. The petition was filed on behalf of death row convict Mukesh Kumar, one of the four men sentenced to death in the case. Earlier in the day, Vinay Kumar Sharma had filed a curative petition in the apex court.
A curative petition is the last legal remedy available to a convict.
A Delhi court issued death warrants Tuesday against Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and said they will be hanged January 22 at 7.00 am in Tihar jail.
In his curative plea, Vinay said his young age has been erroneously rejected as a mitigating circumstance.
“The petitioner’s socio-economic circumstances, number of family dependants including ailing parents, good conduct in jail and probability of reformation have not been adequately considered leading to gross miscarriage of justice,” the plea said.
It stated that the court’s judgment has relied on factors such as ‘collective conscience of society’ and ‘public opinion’ in deciding the sentence to be imposed on him and others.
“The impugned judgment is bad in law as subsequent judgments of apex court have definitely changed the law on death sentence in India allowing several convicts similarly placed as him to have their death sentence commuted to life imprisonment,” the plea pointed out.
The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gangraped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before being thrown out on the road. She died December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
Agencies
