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The Delhi High Court on Thursday rejected the claim of Pawan Kumar Gupta, one of the convicts in the December 16 gang-rape, that he was a juvenile at the time of the crime. The court said that it cannot determine the age claim at this stage.
Justice Suresh Kait, while rejecting the plea, also slapped a fine of Rs 25,000 on Gupta’s counsel AP Singh for wasting its time and using delaying tactics. It also asked the Bar Council of Delhi to take action against Singh for filing the affidavit pertaining to the age.
Earlier in the day, the court had recalled an order of adjournment passed in the morning in the case related to a plea filed by the convict claiming that he was a juvenile in 2012 when the incident took place.
On Thursday, when the matter came up for hearing before Justice Suresh Kait, advocate AP Singh sought time from the court to file some additional documents.
Justice Suresh Kait allowed the time and posted the matter for January 24, 2020.
However, a little later, counsel for the state as well as the advocate appearing for the 23-year-old paramedic student’s parents mentioned the case. They told the court that these are the delay tactics used by the convicts to drag the matter. They stated that the review petition of accused has already been dismissed by the Supreme Court and the trial court has fixed January 7 as the next date of hearing in a plea seeking issuance of death warrant.
The high court said that it had granted the adjournment as the convict said they want to amend their petition.
It then asked the Delhi gang-rape victim’s parents to wait for sometime and granted passover in case and said it will look into it.
The petitioner sought the court’s direction for an ossification test to determine his age and settle the question of juvenility. Gupta’s lawyer AP Singh stated that no ossification test was conducted by the investigating officers and claimed that the juvenility claim could be raised at any time, even after the final disposal of the case.
He claimed Gupta to be an “innocent boy” who was “totally falsely implicated” in the case by “anti-social elements” due to a “revengeful motive” with the “help of police officials”.
Apart from Gupta, the other three convicts in the case are Mukesh, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh. The 23-year-old paramedic student was gang-raped and brutally assaulted on the intervening night of December 16-17, 2012 in a moving bus in south Delhi by six persons before she was thrown out on the road.
She died on December 29, 2012 at a hospital in Singapore.
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