DCW issues notice to Tihar, police over hanging of December 16 convicts

The notice by the DCW chairperson Swati Maliwal was issued despite the four convicts having the option to seek review of the apex court's judgement, file curative petition and seek mercy from the President after exhausting judicial remedies.

The execution of a condemned prisoner is carried out only after the trial court issues a death warrant in the case concerned.

According to a statement issued by the Commission, the parents of the deceased have complained to the women's panel that even after six months of the Supreme Court upholding the death sentence for the four convicts, who had brutally raped and killed their daughter Jyoti Pandey, they have not yet been hanged.

The apex court on May 5 this year had upheld the death sentence for four men convicted of the savage rape and murder of the young woman, terming the attack on her as the "most brutal, barbaric and diabolical".

However, the convicts have the option to seek review of the apex court's judgement, file curative petition and seek mercy from the President after exhausting judicial remedies.

Maliwal, in her notice to the Tihar Jail administration and DCP South District, has inquired as to why the accused have not been hanged despite the SC order.

The Commission has asked the officials to respond by November 6.

The four convicted men who are lodged at Tihar jail are Mukesh (29), Pawan (22), Vinay Sharma (23) and Akshay Kumar Singh (31).

A fifth accused, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in Tihar Jail in March in 2013 and the sixth, a convicted juvenile, was sentenced three years of punishment in a reform home and released in 2015.

The six men had assaulted Jyoti Pandey, the 23-year-old paramedic student, and a male friend in a moving bus as it drove through the streets of New Delhi. She was thrown out of the bus - so grievously injured that her insides were spilling out - along with her male friend near the airport.

A fortnight later, on December 29, 2012, she succumbed in a Singapore hospital.