Centre goes to Supreme Court for "victim centric" rules in death penalty cases

The government today asked the Supreme Court for "victim-centric" guidelines in death penalty cases and a time-limit for convicts using their last available legal options. The current rules are skewed towards the convicts and allowed them to "play with the law and delay execution," the centre says in its petition amid anger over a delay in the Nirbhaya convicts' hanging.

The petition asks for a modification in a past Supreme Court judgment on rights available to death row convicts and says there should be a time limit to file a curative petition after the Supreme Court rejects the petition seeking review of a convict's death sentence.

The four convicts sentenced to death in the 2012 Delhi gang-rape or the "Nirbhaya" case were initially supposed to hang today, going by a lower court order on January 9.

However, the court declared a new time for execution - 6 am on February 1 - after one of the convicts filed a mercy petition last week.

Under the rules, even after the mercy petition is rejected by the President, 14 days have to be given to the convict until execution.

Last week, the Supreme Court also rejected the claim of one of the four Nirbhaya case convicts that he was underage at the time of the incident. The court said an age claim rejected earlier, cannot be raised again.

Pawan Kumar Gupta's plea had been rejected by the Delhi High Court earlier. "How many times will we hear the same things, you have raised it already many times," the court said, hearing the petition filed on Friday, the day the second date of execution was announced.

Nirbhaya's parents are among those who have questioned petitions filed by the convicts at the eleventh hour as a way of delaying the sentence. 

The young woman who came to be known as Nirbhaya was gang-raped and tortured with an iron rod on a moving bus on December 16, 2012, before being dumped on the road with severe internal injuries. She died two weeks later, leaving a shocked and angry nation demanding justice and tough action.


With inputs from NDTV