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PROSECUTORS SOUGHT THE death sentence today 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” yesterday.
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 mother of the victim, an ambitious student who was on the verge of becoming the family’s first professional, could be seen seated next to her husband as she listened intently to proceedings while dressed in a green sari.
“The manner (in which) they committed this crime and destroyed a life, they should not get anything less then the death sentence,” she told NDTV television.
The defence lawyers acting for the men argued that there was political pressure for an execution.
Vivek Sharma, a defence 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.
Policemen with batons stood guard outside the court this morning, warning they would not tolerate a repeat of the chaotic scenes like yesterday when a fight broke out between Indian journalists as they waited for the verdicts.
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.
- AFP, 2013
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Setting up a transformation office? How many gardai have been allocated to this? Setting up a fancy shmancy office isn’t going to make a difference to the ordinary copper out there, who works 6 ten hour shifts back to back, who have no funding, have shoddy equipment, who deal with signing a hundred passport forms a day, telling someone their relative has just died, dealing with members of the public who all think the function of the gardai is to wave a magic wand and everything will be grand, confronting violent and sometimes armed individuals who have no regard for person or property and wouldn’t hesitate in killing a garda.. The list goes on. What’s needed is about 5,000 more gardai to deal with just the everyday things. Taking calls, responding to said calls, not to be telling the public “we’ve no car today because they’re in court, so we’ll get to your burgled house in about 5 hours “, proper allocation of time to investigate crimes. Oh and they also need a management that give a sh*t about them.
Amen to that MrsWoman.
Not the job it used to be, low pay = low interest in the job, no matter what industry.
Transformation office? When I read that I thought Kathryn Thomas was going to be weighing some fat coppers once a week while Karl Henry tried his best to give out to them.
Combatting the scourge of the breakfast roll.
A transformation office? Now that’s the best one I’ve heard yet
Hhmm . We will see about this ” reform” ? No confidence in the Governments ” security guards”.
Total waffle. G in Garda now stands for girlie.
Hillarious. Did you come up with that all by yourself?
Wonder will it make any difference to a force that has the tradition of what we have seen over the years? Not very hopeful
What tradition is that?….
And P in Peter now stands for Tool
Reserves badly managed, very unfair on all involved. Should be an asset but set up so badly it will not work, a pity many with good intentions but no guidance.
I wonder did they call it Operation Transformation
The transformation office is charged with……
Blocking reform, maintaining illegal gardai perks and practises, insuring that all investigations of garda wrong doing is suppressed. Naturally a lot of middle ranking gardai will be of the streets to staff the office. Ahhhh the smell of quango and corruption permeates the FG/LAB junta.
Is Mik The Pink now directing which way the Garda Siochana should be run
Thats soooo soooo reassuring.
A “transformation office” are we guna hav pre-op & post-op shicaloni now?
Mrswoman, could the 5,000 extra gardai needed be filled with garda reservists? Could they help out walk the beat, sign passports etc etc? Free up time
@Shelly. Are there even 5000 reserves? They don’t have full powers. They don’t work (as reserves) everyday… They don’t get paid. Not worth a damn.
Another sign of the Gardai being run by bean counters and desk jockeys of many varieties. Policing is not a business, you can’t run it like a business. Jobs for the boys in nice safe offices, people with useless management degrees telling actual police officers what to do. No regard for what is actually needed – more actual Gardai – not reserves – and not politically correct yes men & women. More shite “reform” from the “New” Commissioner – sure she’s a new broom blah blah blah
fas is now solas, what a difference.
I just think they (reservists) should be allowed to do the more mundane jobs and your time could be freed up to do proper policing. They could be rostered to get more involved on the days they work. That’s all
@Shelly, as far as I know the reserves accompany gardai to calls, help out in the station etc. But you might see a reserve once every three or four weeks…. They should concentrate on getting more Gardai out there, the force is crying out for not hundreds, but thousands.
Transformation me Asre!!! Are we really gonna see a transformation in gardai cancelling penalty points for themselves? their buddies and judges. Are we really gonna see a stop to murdering the spirits of well meaning and honourable whistleblowers? are we really gonna see a transformation in gardai being the private security thugs for government and Irish Water and Shell? Are we really gonna see a transformation in gardai fabricating evidence in pursuit of innocent or guilty parties? Are we really gonna see a transformation of their current ‘inability’ to pursue corrupt politicians, clergy, bankers and elite generally? Are we gonna see a transformation of the majority of PC plodders being silent about the behaviour of the minority of gardai? Not bloody likely….
fantastic by the government yet again. i can’t wait for FGs second term :)
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