Nirbhaya case: SC to hear review plea in December

NEW DELHI: The four death-row convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape-cum-murder case will get one more opportunity to escape the gallows as the Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear their review plea against the verdict holding them guilty and awarding the death sentence.

A bench of Chief Justices Dipak Misra and Justices R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan posted the review plea for December 12 when their lawyer will be allowed to argue the case.

On May 5, the SC had awarded death sentence to the four convicts and said the “brutal, barbaric and diabolic nature of the crime shook the conscience of humanity” and they deserved the extreme punishment. The court held Vinay Sharma (23), Akshay Thakur (31), Mukesh (29) and Pawan Gupta (22) guilty and awarded them death sentence.


Of the two other accused, Ram Singh allegedly committed suicide in Tihar jail and a juvenile was sent to a reformation home for three years and has since come out.

Challenging the SC’s verdict, Mukesh filed a review petition alleging that the court did not properly examine crucial evidence in the case and urged the court to re-examine its decision. The counsel for the other three convicts told the court that he would soon file an application seeking review of the judgment.

M L Sharma, appearing for Mukesh, claimed that he was falsely implicated in the case and he was not on the moving bus in which Nirbhaya was gang-raped.

The 23-year-old paramedic was brutally assaulted and gang-raped in a moving bus in south Delhi and thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend on the night of December 16, 2012. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.