New Delhi: Delhi's Patiala House Court will on Saturday (January 25) hear the petition filed by an advocate for two of four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case. The application accuses Tihar jail authorities of not handing over certain documents, in an attempt to cause delay to the filing of convicts' mercy and curative petitions.
On Friday, advocate AP Singh moved an application in the court alleging that the jail authorities are yet to release the documents which are required to file curative petitions for Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Singh (25). The fourth convict Mukesh Singh is the only one whose mercy petition has been rejected by President Ram Nath Kovind.
According to IANS, Singh stated in the application that the convicts undertook several steps to obtain relevant information necessary for filing the mercy petitions. In regular interval, the convicts requested the concerned authority to supply documents pertaining to their medical records from 2012 to 2015 and 2019-2020, records of cellular confinement, records of the amount earned in prison through labour, records of educational and reformative activities like Tihar Olympics and Painting, etc.
"Despite multiple requests, the documents pertaining to convict Vinay Sharma had not been provided and further similar documents should be directed to be provided for convicts Pawan Gupta and Akshay Thakur from the superintendents of the respective jails," the application said.
The four convicts of Nirbhaya case are scheduled to be executed at Jail No 3 in Tihar prison on February 1 at 6:00 am.
On January 22, the Ministry of Home Affairs had moved the Supreme Court for fixing a seven-day deadline for executing the death penalty of condemned prisoners. The plea of MHA assumes significance in view of the death row convicts in the sensational Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case of 2012 filing review, curative and mercy petitions, which has delayed their hanging.
On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang-raped and brutally assaulted in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people. All the six accused were arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder. One of the accused was a minor and appeared before a juvenile justice court, while another accused committed suicide in Tihar Jail.
Four of the convicts were sentenced to death by a trial court in September 2013, and the verdict was confirmed by the Delhi High Court in March 2014 and subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in May 2017, which also dismissed their review petitions.
The juvenile involved in the crime was convicted by a juvenile justice board and released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.
