New Delhi: The Supreme Court will Monday consider ‘in chamber’ the curative plea of one of the four death row convicts, Pawan Kumar Gupta, in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case, a day before their scheduled hanging.
The curative petition will be considered by a bench of justices NV Ramana, Arun Mishra, RF Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan in the chamber of Justice Ramana.
Pawan, 25, against whom the death warrant has been issued for execution March 3 along with the three other condemned prisoners, has claimed juvenility to seek commutation of sentence to life imprisonment. He has filed the curative plea through lawyer AP Singh seeking setting aside of the apex court’s earlier verdicts on appeals and review petitions in the case.
Advocate AP Singh said he has filed an application in the apex court registry Sunday seeking an oral hearing on Pawan’s curative plea in the open court.
Pawan is the last death row convict in the case to move the top court with his curative plea, the final legal remedy available to a person.
A 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, who came to be known as ‘Nirbhaya’ (fearless), was gang raped and savagely assaulted in a moving bus in South Delhi on December 16, 2012. She died a fortnight later.
Pawan and another convict Akshay Singh has also moved a trial court here Saturday seeking stay on the execution of death warrants. The trial court has issued notice to Tihar Jail authorities on the pleas, directing the officials to file their response by Monday.
While Akshay has claimed that he has filed a fresh mercy petition before the President of India, which is pending, Pawan said he has moved a curative plea before the Supreme Court.
Akshay has also said that his earlier mercy petition that was dismissed by the President did not have complete facts.
In the curative plea before the apex court, Pawan has pleaded that his age on the day of offence was 16 years and two months as per the school records last attended by him and ‘the age has not been determined in accordance with the procedures laid down under the Juvenile Justice Act’.
It should be stated here that the trial court here February 17 had issued fresh date for execution of death warrants for March 3 at 6.00am for the four convicts – Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan, Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay (31) – in the Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case.
PTI
