Four adult men convicted for cold-blooded murder and gangrape of a 23-year-old paramedic student in December in 2012 were on Friday sentenced to death by a Delhi court, a decision the judge said will send “strong deterrent message” that a ghastly act of this gravity cannot be tolerated.

“The convicts be hanged by neck till they are dead,” additional sessions judge Yogesh Khanna said, while observing that “in the times when gruesome crimes against women have become rampant, courts cannot turn a blind eye to the need to send a strong deterrent message to the perpetrators of such crimes.”
The accused — Mukesh (26), Akshay Thakur (28), Pawan Gupta (19) and Vinay Sharma (20) — were convicted by the court on September 10 for the gangrape.
As the judgment was announced, one of the convict, Vinay Sharma, broke down in tears and cried loudly, while the other three men remained in a stoic state.
“My daughter can now finally rest in peace,” the mother of the victim told reporters after the verdict.
Asserting that “the inhuman acts of torture before the death of girl had shocked the collective conscience”, judge Khanna said the case fall in the “rarest of rare category”, which justified capital punishment.
The court declared that the gravity of the incident depicted the “hair-rising” and “beastly” behaviour of the convicts and that it had shaken the “collective conscience” of the society.
“The subjecting of the prosecutrix (victim) to inhuman acts of torture before her death had not only shocked the collective conscience but calls for the withdrawal of the protective arm of the community around the convicts. This ghastly act of the convicts definitely fits this case in the bracket of rarest of rare cases,” the court said.
In its 20-page judgment, the court noted that, “the increasing trend of crimes against women can be arrested only once the society realise that there will be no tolerance from any form of deviance against women and more so in extreme cases of brutality such as the present one and hence the criminal justice system must instil confidence in the minds of people especially the women.”
“The crime of such nature against a helpless women, per se, require exemplary punishment,” it said. The court said “the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances in the case.” The “severity” of the injuries and the “unprovoked” suffering inflicted upon the “defenceless” victim were relied upon by the court, while handing down the capital punishment.
Stating that the “unprovoked crime” by the convicts demonstrated exceptional “depravity of mind” the court said it relied upon the “severity” of the injuries and the “suffering” inflicted upon the “defenceless” victim, while handing down the capital punishment.
Weighing the factors against and in favour of the convicts in deciding the punishment, the court said the aggravating circumstances are that the offence was committed in an extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting and thus dastardly manner so as to arouse intense and extreme indignation of society. The mitigating circumstances noted by the judge included the young age of the convicts, their socio-economic status, citing which they had sought a chance for reformation, and their clean antecedents.