Supreme Court appoints 2 top lawyers for Nirbhaya case convicts

NEW DELHI: As the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case fight their last legal battle to escape the gallows, the Supreme Court on Friday appointed senior advocates Raju Ramachandran and Sanjay Hegde to defend them.

Noting that all aspects of the case needed to be examined and that the convicts' lawyers were not experts in criminal law, a bench of Justices Dipak Misra, V Gopala Gowda and Kurian Joseph said they needed to be defended by more experienced lawyers so that they were not denied justice.

The convicts' counsel opposed the appointment saying they would argue the case threadbare. Rejecting their submission, the court said "no one can prevent the court from appointing amicus curiae" to assist it. The next hearing is on July 18.

Almost two years after staying the execution of death sentence of the four condemned prisoners, the apex court began final hearing on their appeal on April 4.

Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old paramedic, was brutally gang-raped by six men in a moving bus in south Delhi on December 16, 2012. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29. The convicts - Vinay Sharma (23), Akshay Thakur (31), Mukesh (29) and Pawan Gupta (22) - were awarded death sentence by a trial court in September 2013. Six months later, the Delhi high court upheld their conviction and sentence.