Hearing tomorrow, says SC on plea for death warrants against 4 rape convicts

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The Supreme Court will tomorrow take up petitions filed by the central and Delhi government who want a black warrant issued to execute the four men convicted for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedic trainee in 2012.

Additional Solicitor General KM Natraj mentioned the appeals for an early hearing before a bench led by Justice NV Ramana on Thursday who ordered that the case be listed tomorrow.

The two governments are appealing against the verdict of the Delhi High Court that turned down a request to hang at least two of the four convicts who have exhausted their legal options.

The high court had cited the Supreme Court verdict in an “unfortunate” case where after one convict was executed, the co-accused’s death sentence was commuted to life.

“Convict Mukesh (who was the first to file a mercy petition) cannot be adversely segregated from the similarly placed convicts simply because he has been sincerely and earnestly pursuing his legal remedies,” Justice Suresh Kumar Kait of the Delhi High Court had ruled.

The Centre had sought to hang at least two convicts who have exhausted all legal remedies available to them — review plea, curative petition and the mercy plea before the President. As on Wednesday, three of the four convicts’ mercy petitions stood rejected.

The fourth convict, Pawan Gupta, is yet to file a curative plea and seek mercy from the President.

As Mukesh did, they are entitled to challenge the rejection of the mercy petition in the Supreme Court.

The four death row convicts have timed their mercy petitions in a sequence, allegedly to buy time. Justice Kait had noted that the convicts adopted all the delaying tactics to frustrate the warrants but noted that the government hadn’t acquitted themselves either.

Once the Supreme Court rejected their criminal appeals on 5 May 2017 against the death sentence, the judge said “nobody had bothered to execute the death warrants”.

A review petition filed by Mukesh Singh was rejected on 9 July 2018.

“Even thereafter, all authorities concerned were sleeping and waited till Akshay Kumar Singh filed a plea with 950-day delay on December 10, 2019 and the same was dismissed on December 18, 2019,” the judge wrote in his order.