HC upholds death penalty of 4 convicts of Dec 16 gangrape

Holding the December 16 gangrape and murder case as "extremely fiendish" and "unparalleled in the history of criminal jurisprudence", the Delhi High Court today upheld the death sentence of four convicts in the case, saying "exemplary punishment" is the need of the hour.
Rejecting the appeals by the convicts against the trial court's verdict, the high court said the offences were "completely revolting" and committed in an "extremely fiendish, demoniac, barbaric and nefarious manner".
"Exemplary punishment is, therefore, the need of the hour, for, if this is not the rarest of rare cases there is likely to be none," it said.

The court, in its 340-page judgement, confirmed the death reference of Delhi government and simultaneously, rejected the appeals of four surviving convicts, Akshay Thakur (29), Vinay Sharma (21), Pawan Gupta (20) and Mukesh (27).
"We conclude by stating the obvious that a strong message needs to be sent to the perpetrators of grotesque and ghastly crimes against women that such crimes shall not be countenanced, though we confess that we are not aware of any case in which a crime of such dimensions has been committed hithertobefore.
"We cannot also but be conscious of the fact that the gruesome manner of the execution of the crime in the instant case is in a sense unparalleled in the history of criminal jurisprudence and that if the rising trend towards such crime is not nipped in the bud and arrested at its inception, the poison is likely to spread like wild fire through the social order, rendering it hapless and defunct," a bench of justices Reva Khetrapal and Pratibha Rani said.

The court, in its verdict, also dealt with the nature and the manner of the offence and the subsequent trauma suffered by the 23-year-old paramedic on the fateful night of December 16, 2012, when she was brutally assaulted and gangraped by six persons in a moving bus in South Delhi and thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29.
"The offence in the present case has indubitably been committed in an extremely fiendish, demoniac, barbaric and nefarious manner. Also the manner in which the offence has been committed is demonstrative of exceptional licentiousness and perversion of a superlative degree.

"Further, the time, place, manner of execution and the motive behind the commission of the crime speaks volumes of the pre-meditated and callous nature of the offence. The medical evidence charters the hellish misery and trauma inflicted upon the prosecutrix before her death," it said adding, "The entire incident is completely revolting, gruesome and spine chilling.