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Death for Nirbhaya rapists
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld death sentences against four men who fatally gangraped a woman on board a bus in 2012, a crime that sparked widespread protests and drew international attention to violence against women.
Supreme Court upholds death penalty to 4 convicts in 2012 Delhi gangrape case
​New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday upheld death sentences against four men who fatally gangraped a woman on board a bus in 2012, a crime that sparked widespread protests and drew international attention to violence against women.
Applause broke out in court among relatives of the victim—whose identity is protected by law—as judges explained the crime met the “rarest of the rare” standard required to justify capital punishment in India.
“It’s a barbaric crime and it has shaken the society’s conscience,” Justice R Banumathi said, as a three-judge Supreme Court panel threw out an appeal on behalf of the defendants.
The five men and a juvenile lured the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist and her male friend on to a bus in New Delhi on 16 December 2012, before repeatedly raping the woman and beating both with a metal bar and dumping them on a road.
The woman died of internal injuries nearly two weeks later in a Singapore hospital. “I am very satisfied. Today I am happy,” the victim’s mother said outside the courthouse. Her father said: “It’s not just a victory for my family, it’s a victory for each and every woman in our country.”
Four of the attackers were sentenced to death 2013 while the fifth hanged himself in prison during the original seven-month trial. That verdict was upheld by the Delhi high court in 2014.
The four—gym instructor Vinay Sharma, bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Thakur, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta and unemployed Mukesh Singh—then appealed to the Supreme Court. The defendants were not in court on Friday.
A petition seeking review of the judgement would be filed, as the top court has succumbed to public pressure and the demonstrations which were carried out in protest against the incident, said advocate AP Singh, who was the defence counsel for Akshay Thakur and Vinay Sharma—two of the four convicts.
Advocate M L Sharma also said a review petition would be filed as he claimed that one of his clients, Mukesh Singh, was implicated in the case.
The last recourse of the convicts, all of whom are now in their twenties, would be to seek clemency from President Pranab Mukherjee.
The crime sparked large-scale protests and led thousands of women across the country to break their silence over sexual violence that often goes unreported. It also shone a spotlight on what women’s groups call a rape epidemic in the country.
In 2015, police registered more than 34,000 rape complaints and 84,000 women filed sexual harassment cases, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
Authorities have stiffened penalties against sex crimes, introduced fast-track trials in rape cases and made stalking a crime.
The sixth defendant, a minor accused of pulling out part of the woman’s intestines with his own hand, was sent to a reform home for three years and has since been released.
