NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a plea by one of the convicts in Nirbhaya gang rape case where he had claimed that he was a juvenile when the crime was committed.
The Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed by convict
Pawan Kumar Gupta was dismissed as the court did not find any fresh ground in the matter.
Pawan has claimed that he was a juvenile at the time of crime and the Delhi high court had ignored this fact.
A Supreme Court bench headed by Justice R Banumathi was hearing on the plea of a death-row convict Pawan Kumar Gupta in the Nirbhaya case against a Delhi High Court order.
Gupta's counsel told the bench that the convict was minor at the time of commission of offence in December 2012 and the high court had wrongly dismissed plea.
The bench said the claim of being a juvenile was not taken initially during trial in the Nirbhaya case. However, Gupta's lawyer contended that it was taken as a 'mitigating circumstance' at the time of sentencing in the case.
Gupta had moved the apex court on Friday. He has also sought a direction restraining the authorities from executing the death penalty, scheduled for February 1.
A Delhi court on Friday issued fresh death warrants for February 1 against the four convicts — Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Kumar, Akshay Kumar Singh and Pawan — in the case.
A 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 she was thrown out on the road.
(With inputs from agencies)
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