The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear on January 20 a Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed by one of the death-row convicts in the Nirbhaya rape case claiming that he was juvenile during the commission of the crime in 2012.
A three-judge bench headed by Justice R Banumathi and also comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan and A S Bopanna will hear the petition.
Pawan Gupta had yesterday filed the SLP before the apex court challenging the Delhi High Court's decision to dismiss his plea claiming that he was juvenile at the time of the incident.
"Gupta was a juvenile at the time of the crime and the Delhi High Court had ignored this fact during the proceeding," the convict's lawyer AP Singh told ANI.
Pawan's date of birth as per the school record is October 8, 1996, but the Delhi High Court had ignored this fact, Singh has contended in the petition.
Yesterday, a Delhi court had issued a fresh death warrant against the four death-row convicts in the Nirbhaya rape case, who would now be executed on February 1 at 6 am.
Four men, Vinay, Akshay, Pawan and Mukesh were convicted and sentenced to death for raping a 23-year-old woman in a moving bus in the national capital on December 16, 2012.