A 5-Judge bench of the Supreme Court today (January 14, 2020) dismissed the curative petitions filed by two Nirbhaya gang rape case condemned prisoners - Vinay Kumar and Mukesh - who questioned the death sentence awarded to them. 

The bench of Justices N V Ramana, Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan were unanimous that there was no merit in the curative petitions of Vinay Sharma and Mukesh seeking reconsideration of death sentence awarded to them in the gang rape case.

The curative petitions were filed by two rape-murder convicts namely, Mukesh (aged 32) and Vinay Sharma (aged 26) in the infamous 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case yesterday (January 14, 2020). Other convicts in the rape-murder case namely Pawan Gupta (aged 25) and Akshay Kumar Singh (aged 31) hadn’t filed curative petitions. 

The four convicts gang-raped and murdered a 23 year old woman in a moving bus in the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi. The paramedic student was raped on the intervening night of December 16, 2012, inside a running bus in south Delhi by six persons and severely assaulted before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29, 2012, at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore, where she was airlifted from Delhi for treatment.

After being convicted and sentenced to death for gang-raping and murdering a woman in 2012, this curative petition would be the last resort for them. If this curative petition gets dismissed by the Supreme Court, both of them, along with their co-convicts named Pawan Gupta and Akshay Kumar Singh are ordered by Additional Sessions Judge, Patiala House Court in Delhi, to be executed on January 22, 2020.