Three judges of the Supreme Court will hear death row convict Mukesh Singh’s petition on Tuesday. He has challenged the presidential order rejecting his mercy plea. The hearing will begin at 12.30 pm.
Earlier in the day, Mukesh Singh, one of the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case, had sought an urgent hearing in the Supreme Court on his plea against the dismissal of his mercy plea by the President, Ram Nath Kovind.
Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sharad Arvind Bobde told his lawyer to move the Supreme Court Registry for urgent listing of his plea.
The CJI said that if somebody is going to be hanged then nothing can be more urgent than this. He has asked Mukesh’s counsel to approach the mentioning officer today. The bench also comprised of justices B R Gavai and Surya Kant.
The hanging for all four convicts is scheduled on February 1.
On Saturday, Singh approached the Apex court and challenged the rejection of his mercy plea by the President on January 17 within a span of just four days. This is also the fastest decision ever taken on a such a type of plea.
Singh had relied on the guidelines laid down in the judgment by the top court in 2014 in the Shatrughan Chauhan vs Union of India case and cited the manner in which the mercy plea was rejected.
This comes seven years after a medical student was brutally raped, tortured and left to die by five men and one juvenile. She later succumbed to her injuries in a Singapore hospital. Nirbhaya became synonymous with protests and outrage across the country with demands for legal action against the accused.
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Out of the five, Ram Singh, committed suicide in Tihar jail during the trial while the juvenile accused was sent to a reform house and released three years later.
Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur were convicted and sentenced to death by the trial court in 2013. The conviction and sentence were confirmed by the Delhi high court in 2014 and the Supreme Court in May 2017.