SC dismisses review petition in Nirbhaya case

New Delhi, Dec 18 (HS): Supreme Court today dismissed the last review petition in the gang rape, torture and killing of a young medical student in Delhi saying, “Review petition is not re-hearing of the appeal over and over again.”
The review petition was filed by Akshya Thakur Singh, one of the convicts in the Nirbhaya’s gang cum murder case that took place on December 16, 2012.
A three-judge bench said that he had an option of pleading for mercy before the President of India and had one week to do so.
The Court pointed out that similar arguments were considered for petitions of the three other convicts in same case requesting a review of their death sentence.
The Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had said, representing the Delhi government, “There are certain crimes where humanity cries and this case is one of them.”
He further said, “On that fateful day, God also must have held His head in shame for two reasons. First, for not being able to save the innocent girl, and second, for having created these five monsters.”
Akshay Singh, the convict, had questioned the dying declaration of Nirbhaya and had alleged that the pressure to implicate him had been overlooked and there had been inefficiency to catch the real perpetrators of the crime.
Akshay Singh’s lawyer AP Singh argued that there was media and public pressure due to which his client was implicated into the case.
He further argued that the dying declaration of Nirbhaya was “doubtful and cannot be relied upon,” adding while pointing to a recent book by a former jailer of the Tihar Jail, where the convicts are lodged, “the book raises questions about the suicide in jail of Ram Singh, one of the accused.
The Court observed that it could not go by views of any author. “We can’t go into all this now. This will set a dangerous trend if people start writing books after the trial is over and talk about such things,” the three judges bench said.
Akshya Singh’s lawyer while referring to the case of the killing of a Delhi school boy in which a bus conductor arrested by the police was cleared by the CBI, said that no CBI enquiry has been initiated in this case.
The review petitions of the three other convicts, Mukesh, 30, Pawan Gupta, 23, and Vinay Sharma, 24, had already been dismissed earlier. Of the six accused of Nirbhaya’s rape and murder, four were convicted, a fifth – Ram Singh – committed suicide and a juvenile was released after three years in a reform home.
Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old paramedic student was gang-raped and tortured with an iron rod on a moving bus in south Delhi on December 16, 2012. Later on she was dumped on a road, naked and bleeding. She died on December 29.