2012 Delhi gang rape convict Mukesh Singh writes to President, seeks mercy
Soon after the court threw out the convicts’ plea against death penalty, Delhi Commission For Women chief Swati Maliwal on Tuesday said hanging is a small punishment for the rapists.
One of 2012 Delhi gang rape convicts, Mukesh Singh, whose curative petition against death penalty was rejected by the Supreme Court earlier today, has moved a mercy petition to President Kovind, reported the news agency ANI quoting jail officials. The President has the power to commute death sentence to life imprisonment.
Mukesh Singh, along with three others, is to be hanged on January 22 at 7 am.
A five-judge bench headed by Justice N V Ramana rejected the curative petitions filed by convicts Vinay Sharma (26) and Mukesh Kumar (32). Two other death-row convicts, Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Gupta (25), had not filed curative petitions.
Soon after the court threw out the convicts’ plea against death penalty, Delhi Commission For Women chief Swati Maliwal said hanging is a small punishment for the rapists.
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 before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.
The men were convicted in 2013 and lost all appeals in a higher court.
