Executioner hired to hang 4 rape convicts preps with dummy, then court stays
A Delhi court on Monday deferred the execution of the four Delhi gang rape convicts that was scheduled at 6am on Tuesday.
An officer of the Tihar Jail in Delhi said a hangman carried out a dummy execution on Monday, a day ahead of the scheduled hanging of the four convicts in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder case, according to ANI.
The hangman Sindhi Ram, also known as Pawan Jallad, from the Uttar Pradesh prisons department, has been tasked with executing Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26) and Akshay Kumar (31) in the December 16, 2012, gang-rape and murder case.
The four men were a part of a group of six, including a juvenile, who had raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in Delhi leading to nationwide outrage. The victim died of her injuries in a hospital in Singapore a fortnight later.
The crime had provoked nationwide protest that brought tens of thousands of people on the streets and led to a major overhaul of laws relating to crimes against women.
A Delhi court on Monday deferred the execution of four convicts, which was scheduled at 6am on Tuesday.
It had on January 7, 2020, issued the death warrant against the four convicts and scheduled their execution on January 22. The date was deferred twice—first to February 1 and then to March 3 as convicts had not exhausted their legal remedies.
Judge Dharmendra Rana also reserved his verdict on Delhi gang-rape convict Pawan Gupta’s request to stop his hanging over his petition to President Ram Nath Kovind for mercy.
The Supreme Court had rejected his curative petition, which he had filed last week, just hours earlier.
Judge Rana, however, underlined during the hearing that Pawan Gupta had missed the seven-day deadline that the high court had set last month for the convicts to avail their legal remedies.
“You are playing with fire...You should be cautious,” the judge told Pawan Gupta’s lawyer AP Singh, according to news agency Press Trust of India.
The judge reprimanded AP Singh more than once through Monday’s hearing for filing the curative petition and mercy petition at the last moment.
