New Delhi, March 15
The Supreme Court today stayed the execution of two of the four persons sentenced to death for gang raping and murdering a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi in December 2012.

“We stay the execution of death sentence of the two accused — Mukesh and Pawan Kumar Gupta — till March 31,” a Bench comprising Justices Ranjana Prakash Desai and Shiva Kirti Singh said in an order passed after an emergency hearing of an appeal filed by the convicts.

Despite today being a holiday, the Bench assembled at 1730 hrs and heard the arguments of the convicts’ counsel Manohar Lal Sharma, who pleaded for a stay of his clients’ execution.

It is a normal practice of the judiciary to grant instant stay in such cases pending disposal of the convicts’ appeal as execution is an irreversible process.

On March 13, the Delhi High Court had upheld the death penalty awarded to the four convicts for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, observing that 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 cases (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 are Akshay Thakur (29), Vinay Sharma (21), Pawan Gupta (20) and Mukesh (27). They were sentenced to death by the trial court of Additional Sessions Judge Yogesh Khanna on September 13, 2013. Subjected to gang rape in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, the victim had died in a Singapore hospital 13 days later.