Nirbhaya convicts to be hanged on March 20

New Delhi: A trial court on Thursday issued the fourth death warrant for the hanging of four Nirbhaya convicts, who will now be executed at Tihar Jail on March 20 at 5.30am.

On Wednesday, President Ram Nath Kovind rejected the mercy plea of one of the four convicts Pawan Gupta. The Delhi government had earlier recommended rejecting his mercy petition.

Gupta, 25, one of the four convicts in the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi, had filed a mercy plea on Monday before the President after the Supreme Court dismissed his curative petition.

Gupta, along with the other four, was scheduled to hang at Delhi’s Tihar jail on March 3 but the hanging had not taken place after he filed the curative petition urging the court that his death sentence be changed to life imprisonment.

He was the last death row convict in the case to move the top court with his curative plea, the final legal remedy available to a person. His lawyer had filed his petition seeking mercy from the President on Monday soon after the SC order.

The trial court had on February 17 issued March 3 as the fresh date for execution of Mukesh Kumar Singh, Pawan Kumar Gupta, Vinay Kumar Sharma and Akshay Singh, convicted in the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy intern. She was raped and savagely assaulted in a moving bus in South Delhi on December 16, 2012, and died a fortnight later.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Kashmir Monitor staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)