NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Friday upheld death sentences against four men who fatally gang raped a woman on board a bus in 2012, a crime that sparked widespread protests and drew international attention to violence against women.

A.P. Singh (C), a lawyer representing three of the four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist in 2012, talks to media after the court hearing in New Delhi, May 5, 2017. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

Applause broke out in court among relatives of the victim - whose identity is protected by law - as judges explained the crime met the “rarest of the rare” standard required to justify capital punishment in India.

“It’s a barbaric crime and it has shaken the society’s conscience,” Justice R. Banumathi said, as a three-judge Supreme Court panel threw out an appeal on behalf of the defendants.

The five men and a juvenile lured the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist and her male friend on to a bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012, before repeatedly raping the woman and beating both with a metal bar and dumping them on a road.

The woman died of internal injuries nearly two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.

“I am very satisfied. Today I am happy,” the victim’s mother said outside the courthouse.

Her father said: “It’s not just a victory for my family, it’s a victory for each and every woman in our country.”

Four of the attackers were sentenced to death 2013 while the fifth hanged himself in prison during the original seven-month trial. That verdict was upheld by the Delhi High Court in 2014.

The four - gym instructor Vinay Sharma, bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Thakur, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta and unemployed Mukesh Singh - then appealed to the Supreme Court. The defendants were not in court on Friday.

‘RAPE EPIDEMIC’

The crime sparked large-scale protests and led thousands of women across India to break their silence over sexual violence that often goes unreported.

It also shone a spotlight on what women’s groups call a rape epidemic in the country. In 2015, police registered more than 34,000 rape complaints and 84,000 women filed sexual harassment cases, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Authorities have stiffened penalties against sex crimes, introduced fast-track trials in rape cases and made stalking a crime.

A.P. Singh, a lawyer representing three of the condemned men, said justice had not been done. He vowed to file a review petition to the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The last recourse of the convicts, all of whom are now in their twenties, would be to seek clemency from President Pranab Mukherjee.

The sixth defendant, a minor accused of pulling out part of the woman’s intestines with his own hand, was sent to a reform home for three years and has since been released.

CAPITAL CONTROVERSY

Despite the toughening of the laws, debate continues over whether they serve as a sufficient deterrent.

On average, 50 crimes against women are registered every day by police in Delhi, including at least four cases of rape, according to a senior official in the federal home ministry.

Opponents of capital punishment argue that public and media pressure swayed the judges in the Delhi gang rape case to impose the death penalty, adding to the hundreds of already waiting on death row in India.

A.P. Singh (C), a lawyer representing three of the four men convicted of raping and murdering a 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist in 2012, talks to media after the court hearing in New Delhi, May 5, 2017. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

“There are many cases of rape and murder where death sentences were not ordered. It can’t be subjective,” said Seema Misra, a lawyer who has worked extensively on cases involving women.

More than 400 people are known to have been sentenced to death in India, according to a tally by Amnesty International, with 136 being condemned in 2016.

The last rapist to be executed in India was Dhananjoy Chatterjee, on Aug. 14, 2004. He was hanged at Alipore Central Jail in West Bengal, on his 42nd birthday, for raping and murdering a teenage girl.</s>The mother of one of the four men, found guilty of the fatal gang-rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi, cries upon seeing the news on a court verdict on a TV inside her house at a slum in New Delhi September 10, 2013. — Reuters picNEW DELHI, May 5 — India’s Supreme Court today upheld the death sentences of four men convicted for the 2012 gang rape and murder of a Delhi student.

Justice Dipak Misra said the 23-year-old woman had suffered a “devastating hour of darkness” as the court rejected an appeal against the death penalty, which was handed down in 2013.

Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was raped and left for dead by a gang of five men and a teenager after she boarded a private bus while going home from the cinema with a male friend.

She died of grievous internal injuries 13 days later.

The brutality of the attack, and her determination to survive long enough to identify her attackers to police, triggered large-scale angry street protests as well as soul-searching about India’s treatment of women.

Four men were convicted in September 2013 for murder, gang rape, theft, conspiracy and “unnatural acts” after a seven-month trial in a fast-track court.

A fifth man, the suspected ringleader, was found dead in jail in a suspected suicide, while the 17-year-old was sentenced to three years in a detention centre and has since been released.

Sentencing the four in 2013, Judge Yogesh Khanna said the case fell into the “rarest of rare category” which justifies capital punishment in India.

Media reports said a round of applause went up in court as the judgement was read out today at the end of an appeal hearing that began last year.

“This is a historic message to all the people, the criminal mindset who wrong women, who inflict violence on women, to know that if you do something like this you will be also paying for it by the severest punishment that exists in our laws of the land,” she said on Indian news channel NDTV. — AFP</s>Four men convicted of a notorious gang rape in New Delhi will be hanged to death, after India's Supreme Court rejected their appeals over the 2012 crime that drew worldwide attention and prompted mass demonstrations and calls to stop the harassment of women — calls that the court repeated today.

The Supreme Court upheld the sentences over what it described as "the brutal, barbaric and diabolic nature of the crime," in which a 23-year-old woman, a physiotherapy student, was attacked and her boyfriend beaten after they boarded a bus. The woman was gang raped as the bus drove through New Delhi, and she and her boyfriend were later thrown off the bus, naked. Nearly two weeks later, the woman died.

The crime was met with shock — and with new public discussions in India about the way women are treated and about an increase in crimes that target them.

"The demonstrations demanding justice for the victim reflect not only the public revulsion at the brutality of her attack, but also the simmering rage over the prevalence of sexual violence in India," NPR's Julie McCarthy reported in 2012. "There were some 228,000 crimes last year against women, up from the year before."

The four men were sentenced to death in September 2013, months after a fifth man who was accused in the case was found dead, hanging in his jail cell. In all, the authorities blamed six people for the crime; a juvenile was given the maximum three-year sentence for someone his age (and has since been released).

In the Supreme Court's nearly 430-page ruling, its lone female justice urged India to do more to sensitize the public to attacks on women and to make gender equality a priority.

That justice, R. Banumathi, also revisited elements of the case that she said affirmed the "rarest of rare" classification that demands the death penalty. She wrote:



"The accused may not be hardened criminals; but the cruel manner in which the gang-rape was committed in the moving bus; iron rods were inserted in the private parts of the victim; and the coldness with which both the victims were thrown naked in cold wintery night of December, shocks the collective conscience of the society."



While Banumathi said she concurred with her male colleagues in the ruling, she also expounded on her reasoning in the case and cataloged the court's approach to affirming the death sentence. In her more than 100-page opinion, Banumathi also gave a breakdown of statistics that show a rise in crimes against women.

The justice wrote, "Honesty, pride, and self-esteem are crucial to the personal freedom of a woman. Social progress depends on the progress of everyone."</s>New Delhi (CNN) Four men convicted of a gang rape that shocked India and attracted worldwide attention will be executed.

India's Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court's decision to sentence the men to death.

The judgment met with applause in the courtroom, according to CNN affiliate News18.

"We are very happy that (the) Supreme Court has heard our voice, and that they understood Nirbhaya's pain in this matter, and that along with Nirbhaya the whole country has found justice," the victim's father, Badrinath Singh, told reporters outside the court, using a nickname for his daughter that means "fearless one."

"We need to work so that the type of crime that happened to Nirbhaya will not happen again," Asha Singh, the victim's mother, said at a press briefing.

"This fight is not ours alone. This is every man's fight. This is everyone's fight. This is every woman's fight."

The case led to protests across India and intense media coverage around the world, shining a light on India's pervasive problem of sexual violence against women.

On the evening of December 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh Pandey, a physiotherapy student in Delhi, was leaving a movie theater after watching "The Life of Pi" with a male friend.

According to police, the bus driver and at least five other men were drunk and looking for a "joy ride."

Police said the men took turns raping the woman, using an iron rod to violate her as the bus drove around the city for almost an hour. Her male companion was beaten as he tried to fight them off. When they had finished, the men dumped their two victims by the side of the road.

Following the ordeal, the woman's injuries were so severe some internal organs had to be removed. She died two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore.

"I want them burned alive," the dying victim told her mother and a visiting magistrate who was recording her statement at the hospital.

In the days following the rape, police arrested and jailed six men. Thousands of Indians marched in protest at the crime across the nation's capital and in cities around the country.

But justice has not been a straight and easy path.

Though the case sparked widespread calls for reform in India, according to government records, there was an increase of 50% in the number of reported rapes in the past five years, to 34,000 in 2015.

Experts said the increase was likely caused by a broadening of the definition of what constitutes rape, and more openness about reporting attacks. However, many warn the figures are still likely an underestimation.

The Delhi gang rape case was an outlier in that the victim did not know the perpetrators. Of reported rapes, according to official statistics, 95% were committed by someone known to the victim.

"There hasn't been the push needed to implement these laws at the state level," Aruna Kashyap, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, told CNN in January.

"The overall response to women's safety is rooted in protectionism -- keep them at home, keep them safe -- rather than create spaces that are safe and equal."</s>NEW DELHI — India’s top court on Friday upheld the death sentences of four men who were convicted in the fatal gang-rape and torture of a 23-year-old medical student on a moving bus in the Indian capital nearly five years ago.

The court held that the nature of the crime, which triggered massive protests across India, made it a fit case for the death penalty. It described the assault as “most brutal, barbaric and diabolical,” according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The victim’s father said he was happy with the court judgment and demanded that the convicts be hanged quickly.

“The court heard our voice and gave justice,” Badri Singh said.

Prosecutors said the four — Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh — took their victim to the back of a private bus in New Delhi, raping her and then damaging her internal organs with an iron rod. She died two weeks later of injuries in a hospital in Singapore, where she was taken for treatment.

The outrage over the New Delhi attack prompted quick action on legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women. Indian lawmakers also voted to lower to 16 from 18 the age at which a person can be tried as an adult for heinous crimes.

Defence attorney A. P. Singh, representing three of the men, said the court should have given a chance to reform and avoided the death penalty. He said he would seek a review of Friday’s judgment from Supreme Court judges.

Ram Singh, the bus driver and the fifth suspect in the crime, was found hanging in his cell in Tihar prison in March 2013, months before the suspects were convicted.

The sixth suspect was just months short of 18 years when the crime took place. He walked out of a correction home in December 2015 after spending three years — the maximum punishment for minors — sparking public outrage and an overhaul of the juvenile law.

Indian courts are notorious for delays as more than 30 million cases are pending before them.

In view of the massive protests across the country, the Indian government put the gang rape case on a fast-track trial.

Swati Maliwal, chief of the New Delhi Commission for Women, said people in India were not scared of committing crimes because of long delays in bringing them to justice.

“The fact is that the road to justice is very, very long in this country,” she said. “Even in this case, it has taken five years. But at least in five years, we are coming to a conclusion. There are women in the country who have been fighting court battles for 10 to 15 years.”

At least six rapes were taking place in the Indian capital every day, she said.

“Nothing much has changed because there is no fear among people that if they do something wrong, they will be punished,” she said.</s>India’s Supreme Court on Friday upheld death sentences against four men who fatally gang raped a woman on board a bus in 2012.

The crime sparked widespread protests and drew international attention to violence against women.

Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh were convicted and handed death sentences by lower courts for the fatal rape of Jyoti Singh, which they challenged in the Supreme Court.

“It’s a barbaric crime and it has shaken the society’s conscience,” Justice R. Banumathi told a packed courtroom as the three-judge Supreme Court panel threw out an appeal on behalf of the defendants.

The five men and a juvenile lured the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist and her male friend on to a minibus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, 2012, repeatedly raping the woman and beating both with a metal bar before dumping them on a road.

The woman died of grave internal injuries two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.

Applause broke out in court among relatives of the victim, whose identity is protected by law, as judges explained that the crime met the “rarest of the rare” standard to justify capital punishment in India.

“Today I am happy,” the victim’s mother said.

Her father said: “It’s not just a victory for my family, it’s a victory for each and every woman in our country.”</s>India's top court has upheld the death sentences of four men convicted of the fatal gang rape and torture of a medical student on a moving bus nearly five years ago. The court held that the diabolical nature of the crime in the Indian capital, which triggered massive protests across the country, made it a fit case for the death penalty.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Andover Advertiser.</s>Supreme Court upholds death penalty for four men convicted of rape that sparked widespread protests and condemnation.

India's Supreme Court has upheld death sentences against four men who fatally gang raped a woman on board a bus in 2012, a crime that sparked widespread protests and drew international attention over violence against women.

The four had challenged a 2013 court ruling that they should be hanged, which was later upheld by an appeals court.

"It's a barbaric crime and it has shaken the society's conscience," Justice R. Banumathi told a packed courtroom on Friday.

READ MORE: A dark trade - Rape videos for sale in India

Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, was raped and left for dead by a gang of five men and a teenager after she boarded a private bus while going home from the cinema with a male friend.

She died of grievous internal injuries 13 days later.

Of the six people arrested, one committed suicide in prison in 2013, while the juvenile was sentenced to three years in a reform facility and released in 2015. 

 

The rape, and Singh's determination to survive long enough to identify her attackers to police, triggered large-scale street protests over the high levels of violence against Indian women and children.

READ MORE: Women in Uttar Pradesh are still waiting for justice

In 2015, more than 34,000 cases of rape were reported in the country, according to the country's National Crime Record Bureau.

Women's rights activist Binalakshmi Nepram said violence against women is a "trend" in India.

"The rise of violence against women will not end with any one case," Nepram told Al Jazeera. "India will take 100 more years to treat its women with the respect they derserve."

She added that there needs to be a change in mindset in the country.</s>New Delhi (CNN) Four men convicted of a gang rape that shocked India and attracted worldwide attention will be executed.

India's Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court's decision to sentence the men to death.

According to CNN affiliate News18, the judgment was met with applause in the courtroom.

Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh were originally sentenced in September 2013, but they appealed the decision in the country's top court.

Another perpetrator was underage at the time and received a lesser sentence , while a sixth attacker died in prison

The case led to protests across India and intense media coverage around the world, shining a light on India's pervasive problem of sexual violence against women.

On the evening of December 16, 2012, Jyoti Singh Pandey, a physiotherapy student in Delhi, was leaving a movie theater after watching "The Life of Pi" with a friend.

According to police, the bus driver and at least five other men were drunk and looking for a "joyride."

Police said the men took turns raping the woman, using an iron rod to violate her as the bus drove around the city for almost an hour. Her male companion was beaten as he tried to fight them off. When they had finished, the men dumped their two victims by the side of the road.

Following the ordeal, Singh's injuries were so severe some internal organs had to be removed. She died two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore.

"I want them burned alive," a dying Singh told her mother and a visiting magistrate who was recording her statement at the hospital.

In the days following the rape, police arrested and jailed six men. Thousands of Indians marched in protest at the crime across the nation's capital and in cities around the country. They gave Singh a nickname -- "Nirbhaya," meaning "fearless one."

But justice has not been a straight and easy path.

Throughout, Singh's parents Badrinath and Asha have continued to speak to the media and take part in activism around stopping sexual violence.

Though Singh's case sparked widespread calls for reform in India, according to government records, there was an increase of 50% in the number of reported rapes in the past five years, to 34,000 in 2015.

Experts say the increase is likely caused by a broadening of the definition of what constitutes rape, and more openness about reporting attacks. However, many warn that the figures are still likely an underestimation.

Singh's case was an outlier in that she did not know the perpetrators. Of reported rapes, according to official statistics, 95% were committed by someone known to the victim.

"There hasn't been the push needed to implement these laws at the state level," Aruna Kashyap, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, told CNN in January.

"The overall response to women's safety is rooted in protectionism -- keep them at home, keep them safe -- rather than create spaces that are safe and equal."</s>The Supreme Court said the 23-year-old woman had suffered a “devastating hour of darkness” as it rejected an appeal against the death penalty, which was handed down in 2013.

“If at all a case warrants the death sentence it is this case,” said Judge R Bhanumati.

Jyoti Singh, a physiotherapy student, was raped and left for dead by a gang of five men and a teenager after she boarded a private bus while going home from the cinema with a male friend.

She died of grievous internal injuries 13 days later.

The brutality of the attack, during which she was penetrated with an iron bar, triggered what the judges on Friday described as a “tsunami of shock” in the Indian capital.

Thousands took to the streets to demand the government tackle the threat to women and urge the harshest punishment for Singh’s attackers.

Four men were convicted in September 2013 for murder, gang rape, theft, conspiracy and “unnatural acts” after a seven-month trial in a fast-track court.

At their sentencing, Judge Yogesh Khanna said the case fell into the “rarest of rare category” which justifies capital punishment in India.

A fifth man, the suspected ringleader, was found dead in jail in a suspected suicide, while the 17-year-old was sentenced to three years in a detention centre and has since been released.

“This is a historic decision and will set an example for the courts in dealing with criminals,” Singh’s father Badrinath told AFP outside the court.

He said he and his wife would urge the president, who has the power to commute a death sentence, to reject any mercy petitions and ensure they were hanged “as soon as possible to conclude the process of justice”.

Lawyers for the four said they would file a review petition — the next stage in the appeals process.

“We are sure the court will change its decision once we appeal and justice will be delivered to the poor,” said A P Singh, which represents three of the four, outside the court.

The defence had argued that the men should be shown leniency in view of their young age and poor backgrounds.

Media reports said a round of applause went up in court as the judgement was read out on Friday at the end of an appeal hearing that began last year.

“This is a historic message to all the people, the criminal mindset who wrong women, who inflict violence on women, to know that if you do something like this you will be also paying for it by the severest punishment that exists in our laws of the land,” she said on Indian news channel NDTV.

The accused — low-paid migrants to New Delhi — brutally assaulted Singh behind tinted windows for 45 minutes, penetrating her with an iron bar.

Her injuries were so severe that she died nearly a fortnight later in a Singapore hospital. She had only briefly regained consciousness, telling family and friends of her desire to see her attackers burn to death.

The case prompted the government to amend the law to introduce tougher punishments for rapists, including the death penalty for repeat offenders.

Nonetheless, levels of sexual assault remain extremely high in the Indian capital, which registered 2,199 rape cases in 2015 — an average of six a day.

Activists say the true number is likely much higher, with many attacks going unreported because of the social stigma attached to sexual crimes.

India has more than four hundred people on death row, but has carried out only four executions in the last decade following an eight-year unofficial moratorium.

In 1983, the Supreme Court said that death sentences — carried out by hanging — should only be handed down by judges in lower courts if the crime was the “rarest of the rare”.

But Indian public opinion remains strongly in support of capital punishment with celebrations held in November 2012 when a gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks was put to death in the first execution in eight years.
The Indian Supreme Court upholds the death sentences imposed on four men convicted in the 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman on board a bus in South Delhi.