[ By Bobby Anthony ]A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court has rejected a curative petition filed by Delhi gang rape convict Akshay Singh Thakur.The SC bench, led by Justice NV Ramana, also dismissed the death row convict’s request to stay his execution.“The application for an oral hearing is rejected. The application for stay of execution of death sentence is also rejected. We have...
A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court has rejected a curative petition filed by Delhi gang rape convict Akshay Singh Thakur.
The SC bench, led by Justice NV Ramana, also dismissed the death row convict’s request to stay his execution.
“The application for an oral hearing is rejected. The application for stay of execution of death sentence is also rejected. We have gone through the curative petitions and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out within the parameters indicated in the decision of this court. Hence the curative petitions are dismissed,” the five judges who considered the curative petition stated in their verdict.
Akshay Singh Thakur is one of the four men convicted for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedic student called Nirbhaya in 2012.
The four convicts, Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Singh Thakur, were convicted and sentenced to death by the trial court in 2013. Their conviction and sentence were confirmed by the Delhi High Court in 2014 and the Supreme Court in May 2017.
Later, review petitions filed by Mukesh Sing, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma against the Supreme Court judgment were dismissed in 2018 and Akshay Singh Thakur’s review petition was dismissed in December 2019.
As per the original verdict, the four Nirbhaya case convicts were scheduled to be hanged until death on February 1, 2020 at 6 am.
However, hours before the Supreme Court rejected Akshay Singh Thakur’s curative petition, the lawyer for the four convicts approached a Delhi Court to request the judge to cancel their hanging because one of them had filed a mercy petition.