New Delhi:
The Supreme Court will decide on Monday if Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the four convicts facing the gallows in the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder who has claimed that he was a juvenile at the time of the offence in December 2012, was a minor. Gupta, who is currently lodged in Tihar jail, had approached the Delhi High Court on Wednesday, alleging that his ossification test was not conducted by investigating officers and claimed benefit under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act. In the petition, his lawyer AP Singh has claimed that Gupta’s school records determine his date of birth to be October 8, 1996, but the Delhi High Court had ignored this point.
The high court rejected his revision petition after which he challenged it before the top court on Friday. A three-judge bench headed by Justice R Banumathi and comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan and AS Bopanna are hearing Gupta’s Special Leave Petition (SLP) and will give the order at 2.30pm. Besides Gupta, the other three convicts in the case are Mukesh, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh.
A 23-year-old paramedic student was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of 16-17 December, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi by six persons before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012 at a hospital in Singapore. A Delhi court issued a fresh death warrant against the four death-row convicts, who will now be executed on February 1 at 6 am.
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