SC to hear Delhi gangrape convict’s plea day before scheduled execution

Gupta’s curative petition is likely to cast a fresh shadow on the death warrant signed for execution of all the four convicts on March 3.

The Supreme Court will on Monday hear the curative petition filed by Delhi gangrape convict Pawan Gupta. The 25-year-old’s curative petition pleads his death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

Pawan Gupta, one of the four convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape case, is the only one to have not exhausted all his legal remedies.

The petition will be considered by a bench of justices N V Ramana, Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan in the chamber of Justice Ramana, news agency PTI reported.

In the plea, Gupta has pleaded that his age on the day of offence in 2012 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”, PTI reported.

Gupta’s curative petition is likely to cast a fresh shadow on the death warrant signed for execution of all the four convicts including Gupta on March 3. The convicts’ execution has already been deferred on two previous occasions due to the pendency of legal proceedings in the case.

Pawan Gupta was the only one out of the four convicts to have not exhausted all his legal remedies, despite a seven-day deadline granted by the Delhi High Court for the purpose. Gupta hadn’t filed either a curative petition or a mercy petition till Friday and his counsel had argued that he wasn’t aware of the time frame set for doing so.

Gupta’s petition comes at a time when Centre is seeking Supreme Court’s approval for hanging the Delhi gangrape convicts separately in its challenge of a Delhi high court order that ruled against it. Centre has accused the convicts of defeating the ends of justice by adopting delaying tactics.

The four convicts were first supposed to be hanged on January 22 but the execution of the death warrant had to be stayed. The second death warrant set the date of hanging as February 1 but had to be stayed, too, in light of mercy petitions and appeals by one or the other convict.

Finally when a seven-day deadline given to the convicts by Delhi High Court to utilize legal options lapsed, a fresh death warrant was issued on February 17 to hang all the four convicts – Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Kumar Singh, Pawan Gupta and Akshay Thakur at 6 am on March 3.