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HC confirms death penalty to 4 convicts
R Sedhuraman
Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, March 13
The Delhi High Court today upheld the death penalty awarded to the four convicts for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in December 2012. The court said if they were not sent to the gallows, then nobody else would deserve to be hanged ever.

“If this is not the rarest of rare case (the judicial norm for awarding death penalty), there is likely to be none,” a Bench comprising Justices Reva Khetrapal and Pratibha Rani ruled in their 340-page judgment.

The four convicts — Akshay Thakur (29), Vinay Sharma (21), Pawan Gupta (20) and Mukesh (27) — were sentenced to death by the trial court of Additional Sessions Judge Yogesh Khanna on September 13 last year, holding them guilty of committing 13 criminal acts in a “beastly and hair-raising manner” on the night of December 16. The girl died in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012.

The Delhi Police had filed the chargesheet on January 3, 2013.

Prime accused in the case, Ram Singh, was found dead in Tihar Jail in March last year, while the sixth accused, who was few months short of 18 at the time of the crime, was sentenced to three years in a correction home by the Juvenile Justice Board.

“The offence in the present case has indubitably been committed in an extremely fiendish, demoniac, barbaric and nefarious manner,” the HC judges remarked in their separate but concurrent verdict.

“It would be no exaggeration or hyperbole to state that the shocking incident had ramifications which crossed the national borders into international terrain,” the HC said, pointing out that the nation-wide protest that had erupted like a volcano resulted in Parliament re-writing criminal laws.