NEW DELHI: The 2012 Nirbhaya rape and murder case finally moved towards closure when a city court on Tuesday ordered the hanging of the four death row convicts at 7am on January 22, saying they had been given "sufficient time and opportunity" to exhaust their legal remedies.The order to execute the death sentence of the convicts - Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Akshay Thakur - comes six years after another trial court had sentenced them to death.Nirbhaya's mother had filed a plea in Delhi's Patiala House courts, through her advocates Jitendra Kumar Jha and Seema Kushwaha, seeking death warrants against the four convicts on December 13, 2018.In his order, additional sessions judge Satish Kumar Arora observed that the convicts had either exhausted their remedies or hadn't exercised some of them despite being given sufficient time and opportunity."In these facts and circumstances, when reasonable time and opportunity has been afforded to them, there is nothing to delay passing of orders on the applications seeking issuance of death warrants," held the court.During the hearing, the lawyers appearing for the convicts sought time to file curative petitions before opting for a mercy plea. The lawyers - amicus curiae Vrinda Grover appearing for Mukesh and Vinay, and AP Singh for Pawan and Akshay - submitted that they were in the process of filing curative petitions. The lawyers, therefore, sought time to exhaust this remedy before opting for a mercy plea.Grover submitted that certain documents required to be relied upon for filing of a curative plea were yet to be supplied to her by the jail authorities. The submissions were opposed by the lawyers appearing for the victim's mother and special prosecutors Rajiv Mohan and Irfan Ahmed.They said that there was nothing pending before any court at this point and the execution of death warrants could be ordered.The prosecutors submitted that the convicts could keep exercising their legal rights even after an order to that effect had been passed.It also came on record that after the last hearing on December 18, 2019, the Tihar jail authorities had informed the convicts about the remedy of filing a mercy petition. This notice, however, was objected to by the convicts on the ground that they still had the remedy of filing a curative petition before the Supreme Court.A status of their legal remedies till now showed that the review petitions of all convicts had been dismissed, with the latest being that of Akshay's on December 12.Judge Arora noted that it was "apparent" from the record that the convicts had already been extended sufficient time and opportunity to exhaust their legal remedies. And as a result, the court disposed of the plea of Nirbhaya's mother and that of the state seeking issuance of death warrants."Copy of this order with the death warrants of execution of sentence of death be sent to the jail superintendent, Tihar, as necessary information and for compliance," the court said.