New Delhi, January 9: Vinay Sharma, one of the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, filed a curative petition before the Supreme Court on Thursday.
Convict Vinay has also sought stay of the death warrant issued by a Delhi court for execution of all four convicts on January 22 at 7 am in Tihar Jail in the National Capital.
A Delhi court had on Tuesday issued death warrants for execution of four convicts in the Nirbhaya case.
Additional Sessions Judge Satish Kumar Arora had ordered that the four convicts—Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31)—be hanged after the prosecution said there was no plea pending before any court or the President by any of them at this juncture and the review petitions of each one of them has already been dismissed by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court had on December 18 rejected convict Akshay Kumar’s petition seeking review of its 2017 verdict upholding the death penalty given to him and three other convicts.
The review petitions of other three convicts—Mukesh (30), Pawan Gupta (23) and Vinay Sharma (24)— were dismissed in July 2018. The top court had said no grounds were made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict. All the convicts are presently lodged in the Delhi’s high-security Tihar Jail.
The 23-year-old paramedic student was brutally gang-raped on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, inside a running bus in South Delhi by six persons and severely assaulted before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012, at a hospital in Singapore.
There were six accused in the case. One of them, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail, while the lone juvenile accused was convicted by a juvenile justice board and later released from a reformatory after three years.
