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Journalism of Courage
Saying that “guilty persons were trying the patience of the country by their delaying tactics,” the Centre Saturday moved the Delhi High Court against a trial court order postponing the execution of death warrants issued against four convicts in December 16, 2012 gangrape-murder case.
Justice Suresh Kumar Kait issued a notice to Tihar Director General Prisons and the four convicts — Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh — who were scheduled to be hanged on Saturday. He sought their stand by Sunday, when it will conduct a hearing on the Home Ministry’s criminal revision, seeking to set aside a trial court order by which it had Friday postponed hanging of the convicts till further orders.
Hearing which, the counsel for Tihar contended the court’s order would be complied with.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Ministry, argued “this case will go down in the history of India where convicts of heinous crime are trying patience of the country”. Mehta said the convicts have taken the process of law on a “joyride” and are acting in tandem to delay their execution.
The Centre’s petition stated Mukesh has “exhausted all possible remedies available to him under law and is now a convict under death sentence waiting to be executed”. “It is submitted that any further delay in the execution of his death sentence would have a de-humanising effect on Mukesh,” the plea said.
The petition, filed by the Centre’s standing counsel Amit Mahajan, said the trial court judge, “while postponing the execution of death warrants ‘till further orders’, failed to consider that the said four convicts have been found to be guilty of a horrible, dreadful, cruel, abominable, ghastly, gruesome and heinous offence of rape coupled with a bone chilling murder of a young girl which shook the conscience of the entire nation”.
The plea stated the “… convicts, by filing their review or curative or mercy petitions, one after another, at such a belated stage…. are being permitted to play with the majesty of law leading to unnecessarily prolonging the execution of the death sentence , taking the judicial process for a ride”.
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