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‘They should be hanged immediately’: Arvind Kejriwal on December 16 gang rape convicts
The Delhi court stated that under the Delhi Prison Rules 2018, if an appeal and application is made by one convict, then the execution sentence of all co-convicts will be postponed as well.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has said that convicts in the December 16 gang rape case should be hanged immediately.
“I am disappointed that Nirbhaya convicts are looking for legal loopholes to delay their hanging. They should be hanged immediately. We need to urgently amend our laws so that in cases of rape, hanging takes place within six months,” Kejriwal said in a tweet on Friday.
His tweet came hours after a Delhi court postponed until further orders the hanging of the four convicts -Akshay Thakur, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, and Vinay Kumar Sharma - which was scheduled for February 1. Giving the reason for postponement, the court said that under the Delhi Prison Rules 2018, if an appeal and application is made by one convict, then the execution sentence of all co-convicts will be postponed as well.
“...I am of the considered opinion that the execution warrant issued by this court vide order dated January 17 deserves to be postponed till further orders,” additional sessions judge Dharmendra Rana said.
The court was hearing a plea filed by one of the convicts, Vinay Sharma, who had sought that the death warrant issued by the court on January 17, for the second time, be stayed in the wake of the mercy petition pending before the President.
The trial court, on January 17, had issued black warrants for all four convicts and ordered their hanging at Delhi’s Tihar jail at 6am on February 1.
The four were sentenced to death by a fast-track court within a year of the gruesome crime on the night of December 16, 2012 when the victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, was gang-raped and assaulted by them in a moving bus in South Delhi. She died of injuries a fortnight later at a Singapore hospital.
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