New Delhi: The Delhi High Court declined Wednesday to entertain the plea of one of the four death row convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case against the death warrant and gave him liberty to challenge it in the Sessions Court.
A bench of Justices Manmohan and Sangita Dhingra Sehgal said there is no error in the trial court’s January 7 order issuing death warrant against convict Mukesh Kumar Singh.
The Delhi government meanwhile informed the high court during the hearing that execution of convicts will not take place January 22 as a mercy plea has been filed by one of them.
The four convicts – Mukesh Kumar (32) Vinay Sharma (26), Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Gupta (25) – were to be hanged on that day.
The Delhi government and the prison authorities said that under the rules, they will have to wait for the mercy plea to be decided before executing the death warrant.
Lawyers of Mukesh told the bench that they will move Sessions Court against the death warrant after the high court said it was not inclined to interfere in the matter and that the petitioner should have moved the Sessions Court or the Supreme Court.
In response to the submission by prison authorities, the court said ‘put your house in order’.
“Your house is in disarray. The problem is people will lose confidence in the system. Things are not moving in the right direction. The system is capable of being exploited and we see a stratagem to exploit the system, which is oblivious about it,” the court said.
During the hearing Delhi government standing counsel (criminal) Rahul Mehra told the bench that now that one of them has filed a mercy plea, the execution of none of the four can be carried out as per the Prison Rules. He said the prison authorities will have to wait for the other co-convicts to exhaust their mercy pleas as well.
To this the bench said, “Then your rule is bad if you cannot take action till all the co-convicts have moved mercy plea. There has been no application of mind. The system is suffering from cancer.”
In defence of prison authorities, Mehra said the convicts were ‘frustrating’ the legal process and system as they were filing curative and mercy pleas in stages to further delay their execution.
Mehra, said the date of January 22 for execution was ‘academic’, as if no decision is taken till noon of January 21 on the mercy plea, then prison authorities have to move the sessions court for a fresh death warrant.
If the mercy plea is rejected before or after January 22, then also a fresh death warrant has to be sought from trial court in respect of all the convicts, he said.
PTI