india

Updated: Feb 29, 2020 19:23 IST

Delhi gang rape and murder case convicts Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta on Satruday moved a petition before a local Delhi court seeking their execution -scheduled for March 3-- is stayed for a third time. The court will hear the plea on Monday, a day before the execution.

The plea was moved by Akshay Thakur and Pawan Gupta, who have been sentenced to death by hanging along with two others, and it says since Thakur has moved a fresh mercy petition before the president and Gupta has filed a curative petition before the Supreme court, their execution can’t be carried out.

Thakur said his fresh mercy petition carries new facts about his financial status.

Also Watch | ‘Not Vinay, AP Singh is mentally unfit’: Delhi gang-rape victim’s mother

Pawan Gupta had filed a curative petition on Friday pleading that his death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. He is the last convict to have filed a curative petition in the December 16 gangrape and murder case. SC had rejected curative petitions of the other three convicts in the past.

The court will hear the plea to stay the execution on Monday, a day before the scheduled hanging.

The convicts have been accused along with their counsels of adopting delaying tactics in order to frustrate the law.

Pawan Gupta had earlier refused to file either a curative petition or a mercy petition and even refused to use the services of a court-appointed counsel, but later sprang a surprise with his counsel AP Singh filing the plea.

Gupta didn’t take the legal recourse left to him despite a seven-day deadline granted by the Delhi High Court for convicts to exhaust all their legal options.

The hanging has already been deferred twice- first on January 22 and then on February 1-- in light of mercy petitions and appeals by one or the other convict. A third death warrant was issued on February 17 to hang the four convicts- – Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Kumar Singh, Pawan Gupta and Akshay Thakur – at 6am on March 3.

All the convicts were sentenced to death by a Delhi court in 2013 after they were found guilty of brutally raping and murdering a 23-year-old paramedic student on a moving bus on December 16, 2012 in Delhi.