Indian President Ram Nath Kovind dismissed on Monday a mercy petition filed by Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the four death-row convicts in the infamous Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, Indian media reported
NEW DELHI (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd March, 2020) Indian President Ram Nath Kovind dismissed on Monday a mercy petition filed by Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the four death-row convicts in the infamous Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case, Indian media reported.
Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court of India rejected Gupta's motion to reduce his death sentence to life imprisonment, the Statesman newspaper reported.
Public prosecutor Irfan Ahmad told the court during the trial that the convicts were trying to delay their execution in every possible way.
"There is no plausible or legal ground to stay the execution of death sentence which has already been deferred twice," Ahmad was quoted as saying by the media outlet.
Gupta was the only defendant in the case who had not yet exhausted his legal remedies. Kovind has previously dismissed the mercy pleas of the three other convicts, Mukesh Kumar Singh, Vinay Kumar Sharma and Akshay Thakur.
The female victim, nicknamed Nirbhaya, or "fearless," was gang-raped and beaten by six attackers on a bus on her way back home from a movie theater with a male friend in mid-December of 2012. She died from her injuries in a hospital shortly after, triggering a powerful outrage across the nation.
In 2013, Gupta, Singh, Thakur and Sharma were sentenced to death by hanging. One of the other rapists, aged 14 at the time of the crime, was set free after serving only three years in prison, while another one was found hanged in his prison cell in the spring of 2013.
