Nearly four-and-a-half years after the gang-rape of Nirbhaya that shook the nation and resulted in a public outcry leading to crucial legislative amendments, the Supreme Court on Friday confirmed the death sentence of the four accused holding them guilty of the “brutal, barbaric and diabolic crime”.
In a 429-page judgment written after 52 days of court sittings spread across a year, a three-judge Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra said, “If at all there is a case warranting award of death sentence, it is the present case…Human lust was allowed to take such a devilish form.”
Despite this verdict, the convicts will have three more chances to save themselves from the gallows. They can argue their case in open court by filing a review petition. If they fail there, they can then file a curative appeal, to be heard in chamber, in Supreme Court. And lastly, they can file a clemency petition for commutation before the President.
Recalling the “horrendous” incidents of the fateful day (December 16, 2012), the Bench said the accused —Mukesh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan, alias Kaalu, and Akshay Kumar Singh, alias Thakur — found in Nirbhaya an “object of enjoyment” whom they ravished with “gross sadistic and beastly instinctual pleasures”, something that the Bench, also comprising Justices R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan, found “humanly inconceivable”.
During the course of trial, the fifth accused Ram Singh committed suicide while the sixth, who was a juvenile, was tried separately and let off after two years’ detention in an Observation Home.
Earlier, the trial court and Delhi High Court too had convicted all the accused and sentenced them to death by their judgment of September 10, 2013 and March 13, 2014 respectively. The accused were found guilty under IPC Sections 302 (murder), 376(2)(g) [gang-rape], 377 (unnatural sex), 307 (attempt to murder), 365 (abduction and wrongful confinement), 395, 396,397 (robbery/dacoity with murder), 201 (destruction of evidence), 120 (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (common intention).
The prosecution’s role was also appreciated by the court as high standards were set by the Delhi Police in gathering technical evidence by way of CCTV footage, medical evidence by way of blood and hair samples, DNA profiling of the accused to match the blood samples on the iron rods, digital palm prints and footprints of the accused that matched with their presence in the bus, and forensic odontology reports that linked the bite marks on the body of the victim to the teeth of the accused.
Seeing the manner in which Nirbhaya, then a 23-year-old paramedic, was bitten all over, stripped, her internal organs gouged out, raped turn by turn by six persons, iron rods inserted into her private parts, and casually thrown out of the bus naked on a cold wintery night to die, Justice Misra, writing the leading judgment, said, “The casual manner in which she was treated and the devilish manner in which they played with her identity and dignity is humanly inconceivable. It sounds like a story from a different world where humanity has been treated with irreverence.”
Holding the case to fall within the “rarest of rare” crimes meriting death sentence, the Bench considered all arguments made in support of a lesser punishment by their counsels and two senior advocates Raju Ramachandran and Sanjay Hegde assisting as amicus, and finally held that the question of any other punishment other than death sentence stood “unquestionably foreclosed.”
The Bench found the act of the accused in pulling out the victim’s internal organs as “savage and inhuman” and found the bite marks sustained by the victim on ten places in her body to be an act demonstrating “mental perversion and inconceivable brutality”. To compound their offence further, the accused stole all valuables the victim and her boyfriend, shared the loot, and even tried to destroy evidence by trying to crush them under the bus after throwing them out.
The accused took the plea of their young age, aged parents, dependant wife and children, their good conduct in jail showing possibility of reformation, to seek commutation of death sentence. Justice Banumathi, who penned a separate yet concurring decision, said, “The accused may not be hardened criminals but the cruel manner in which the gang-rape was committed in the moving bus, iron rods were inserted in the private parts of the victim, and the coldness with which both the victims (victim and her boyfriend) were thrown naked in cold wintery night of December, shocks the collective conscience of the society.”
