Delhi gang rape judge sets sentencing for September 13

NEW DELHI, Delhi province - Agence France-Presse

A man peeks into the police vehicle carrying four men, who were found guilty of the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, as the bus leaves a court in New Delhi September 10, 2013. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

A judge hearing the case of four men convicted of the murder and gang rape of a student on a New Delhi bus last December said he would hand down his sentences on Sept.13.

The "sentence will come on Friday", Judge Yogesh Khanna told the court after hearing about three hours of arguments from the prosecution and defence.

Prosecutors sought the death sentence Sept.11 for four men convicted of the gang rape and murder of a student on a New Delhi bus last December, saying the “diabolical” crime had shocked the country’s conscience.

Judge Yogesh Khanna is hearing arguments in a fast-track court in the south of the Indian capital as he considers how to punish the men who were found guilty of “cold-blooded murder” on Sept. 10.

He faces widespread calls from the public and leading politicians to hand down the death sentence, which can be given for “the rarest of rare” crimes but is seldom carried out in practice.

“The court should give the maximum sentence otherwise the message will go to society that deviance of this nature will be tolerated,” special public prosecutor Dayan Krishnan told the packed court.

“The test is ‘was the collective conscience shocked?’. There can be no better example than this case,” he said, calling the crime “diabolical” in which “no element of sympathy” had been shown to the victim.

“The sentence which is appropriate is nothing short of death,” he added.

The 23-year-old victim, a physiotherapy student who cannot be named for legal reasons, died of grievous internal injuries on December 29 after being lured on to the private bus following a cinema trip with a male companion.

After beating up the friend, the gang brutally assaulted her behind tinted windows for 45 minutes before flinging the bloodied, naked and barely conscious couple from the vehicle on a road leading to the international airport.

The four convicts -- Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh -- were led into the court by armed police and stood at the back of the court wearing t-shirts and displaying no outward emotion.

“The manner (in which) they committed this crime and destroyed a life, they should not get anything less then the death sentence,” the mother of the victim told NDTV television late Sept. 10.

Execution is 'exception,' defense lawyers say

The defense lawyers acting for the men argued that there was political pressure for an execution.

Vivek Sharma, a defense lawyer for Gupta, who was 19 at the time of the crime, argued that life imprisonment should be the sentence for a crime committed on the “spur of the moment”.

“The court must bear in mind that life imprisonment is the rule and the death sentence is the exception,” he said, adding that there was a possibility of reforming Gupta because of his “tender age”.

The case brought simmering public anger over rape and harassment to the boil, sparking unprecedented protests, tougher new laws to tackle sex crime and a bout of introspection about India’s treatment of women.

The judge convicted the men on 11 charges including gang rape, murder, theft and “unnatural offences” and it is not known how long he will consider his sentence. Krishnan urged him to consider a precedent for executing a murderer and rapist in the case of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, a 39-year-old watchman who was hanged in 2004 over the death of a 14-year-old girl in the eastern city of Kolkata. Protesters gathered outside the court on Sept. 10 to demand the four be hanged, some wearing makeshift nooses and black hoods.