NEW DELHI: A 5-judge bench of the Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday the curative petitions filed by two of the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case. The two accused were Vinay Sharma (26) and Mukesh Kumar (32) had filed curative petitions on January 9.

The bench which was headed by Justice N V Ramana consisted of Justices Arun Mishra, R F Nariman, R Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan.

The proceedings were conducted in-chamber. A curative petition is the last and final legal remedy available to a person. The five judges were unanimous that there was no merit in the curative petitions filed by the two condemned petitioners.

A Delhi court had on January 7 issued death warrants against the four convicts and said they would be hanged on January 22 at 7 am in Tihar jail. Two other death-row convicts, Akshay Kumar Singh (31) and Pawan Gupta (25), had not filed curative petitions.

A 23-year-old paramedic student, referred to as Nirbhaya, was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012, in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people before being thrown out on the road. She died on December 29 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore.

The Supreme Court had in 2017 upheld the capital punishment awarded to them by the Delhi High Court and a trial court. One of the six accused in the case, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail. A juvenile, who was among the accused, was convicted by a juvenile justice board and was released from a reformation home after serving a three-year term.

On July 9, 2018, the apex court had dismissed the review pleas filed by three of the convicts in the case, saying no grounds had been made out by them for review of the 2017 verdict.

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