The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed the review petition filed by one of the death-row convicts in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape-and-murder case.
A bench of Justices R. Banumathi, Ashok Bhushan and A.S. Bopanna said Akshay Kumar Singh’s review petition was devoid of merit as no new grounds had been raised in the plea to seek reconsideration of the May 5, 2017, judgment upholding the death sentence of the four accused persons.
The victim, a paramedical student, had been gang-raped in a moving bus and brutally murdered, a crime that shocked the country and triggered widespread protests that prompted the government to make the law more stringent by introducing the death penalty in rape cases.
On May 5, 2017, the apex court had upheld the death penalty handed to all the four convicts — Akshay, Vinay Sharma, Mukesh and Pawan Gupta — saying the “devilish”, “demonic”, “sadistic” and “savage” assault carried out by the convicts deserved no less a punishment. The court held that the crime fell in the “rarest of rare” category that invited the death penalty.
The review petitions of the three other convicts had earlier been dismissed by the Supreme Court on July 8, 2018.