NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the death penalties awarded to Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur on their conviction in the December 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape-cum-murder case

A bench of Justices Ranjana P Desai and N V Ramana admitted petitions filed by Sharma and Thakur and ordered an indefinite stay on execution of the death penalties awarded to them.With this order, the death penalties awarded to all four adult convicts would remain stayed till the apex court decides their appeal against a Delhi High Court judgment which confirmed the trial court’s decision to send them to the gallows for the “horrific crime”. The SC had on March 15 stayed the capital punishments of Mukesh and Pawan Gupta.While concurring with the trial court verdict, the HC had found the offence “extremely fiendish” and “unparalleled in the history of criminal jurisprudence” and said “exemplary punishment” should be imposed. It had also said if this case did not get categorized as “the rarest of rare” warranting imposition of death penalty, then “there is likely to be none”.Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old paramedic, was brutally assaulted and gang-raped by six persons in a moving bus in south Delhi on December 16, 2012 and thrown out of the vehicle with her male friend. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012.