New Delhi: Alleging systematic bias against poor, Vinay Kumar Sharma, one of the four men sentenced to death in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case, on Thursday appealed for rehearing in an open court by senior-most Supreme Court judges.
Filing a curative petition (the last legal remedy available to a convict), Sharma cited the Jessica Lall murder case, stating that Siddharth Vashisht/Manu Sharma was given life imprisonment and not death sentence despite it being a "brutal and unprovoked murder of a defenceless woman".
"The convict was a very powerful person from a political family. This inequity of outcome between the petitioner's case and those mentioned above highlights the fundamental divide in the criminal justice system where the poor and the weak always suffer the 'worst punishments', even when people from other classes are guilty of offences that are barbaric and henious. It also indicates a systematic bias against the poor which has caused prejudice against the petitioner," the plea read.
On Tuesday, a Delhi court issued death warrants against Mukesh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and said they will be hanged on January 22 at 7 am in Tihar jail.
In his curative plea, Sharma further said his young age has been erroneously rejected as a mitigating circumstance. "The impugned judgment is bad in law as subsequent judgments of apex court have definitely changed the law on death sentence in India allowing several convicts similarly placed as him to have their death sentence commuted to life imprisonment," the plea said.
It also said that after pronouncement of the apex court's judgment in 2017 there have been as many as 17 cases involving rape and murder in which various three-judge benches of the top court have commuted the death sentence.
The 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before being thrown out on the road.She died on December 29, 2012 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
On July 9, 2018, the apex court had dismissed the review pleas filed by the other three convicts in the case, saying no grounds have been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict. One of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail here.
A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term. The top court in its 2017 verdict had upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and the trial court.
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