New Delhi: A Delhi court on Monday reserved its order on a petition seeking a stay on the execution of the death sentence in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder case after one of the convicts approached the President with a mercy petition.
Additional Sessions Judge Dharmendra Rana said the court does not have the jurisdiction to go ahead with the death sentence as the matter is now in front of the President.
The court had earlier in the day dismissed the pleas of two of the four convicts in the case seeking a stay on the execution of their death warrants, scheduled for Tuesday morning. But it decided to hear the lawyer of one of the two convicts, Pawan Kumar Gupta, after it was informed that he has filed a mercy plea before the President after his curative petition was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Monday morning.
The court had on February 17ordered that the four convicts --Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) -- be hanged on March 3after it issued fresh death warrants, observing that deferring the execution any further would be "sacrilegious" to the rights of the victim for expeditious justice.
It directed that the four men be hanged by neck on March 3 at 6 am until they are dead. This was for the third time that the death warrants were issued by the court against them.
The court had noted that death warrants were earlier issued on January 7 and the execution was later deferred twice, i.e., on January 17 and January 31.
"Now deferring it any further would be sacrilegious to the rights of the victim for expeditious justice," it had said.
The first date of execution, January 22, was postponed to February 1 by a January 17 court order. Then the trial court, on January 31, stayed, "till further orders" the execution of the four convicts as they had not exhausted all their legal remedies.
The court is hearing the applications by Nirbhaya's parents and the Delhi government, seeking fresh death warrants for the convicts after the Supreme Court granted liberty to the authorities to approach the trial court for issuance of fresh date for the execution of these convicts.
The 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, who came to be known as 'Nirbhaya' (fearless), was gang-raped and savagely assaulted on the night of December 16, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi. She died of her injuries a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital.
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