Supreme Court to hear Delhi gang-rape convict’s plea claiming he was juvenile in 2012

The Supreme Court will on Monday hear a petition filed by one of the convicts in the Delhi gang-rape case. The Special Leave Petition (SLP) has been filed by Pawan Kumar Gupta, claiming that he was a minor at the time of the crime in December 2012, and that the Delhi High Court had ignored this fact while convicting him.

The Delhi High Court had on December 19 last year dismissed Gupta’s claim that he was a juvenile at the time of the offence in December 2012 and had deprecated the conduct of his lawyer AP Singh for filing forged documents and not appearing in the court.

The high court had said that the lawyer filed a forged affidavit in the court regarding Pawan’s age without applying his mind to deliberately delay the process. He also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on the lawyer.

Pawan later moved the Supreme Court challenging the high court’s order.

A Delhi court had on Friday issued fresh death warrants for February 1 against the four convicts - Pawan (25), Vinay Sharma (26), Mukesh Kumar (32) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31) - in the case.

President Ram Nath Kovind had rejected the mercy petition of Mukesh. The other three condemned convicts have not yet availed of the constitutional remedy of filing the mercy petitions.

The apex court had on January 14 dismissed the curative petitions of Vinay and Mukesh against their conviction and capital punishment.

The two other convicts - Akshay and Pawan - have not yet filed curative petitions in the top court.

A 23-year-old paramedic student 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 who later threw her out on the road.

She died on December 29, 2012 at a hospital in Singapore.