Guilty as charged!

One accused in the case – Ram Singh – was found dead in Tihar jail and the trial against him was abated. However, the court in its order also held him guilty of the charges with other accused – Mukesh, Akshay Singh Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma. There were six accused in the case in which one later turned out to be a juvenile. A few days back, the Juvenile Justice Board had convicted him and had awarded the maximum punishment of three years in a probation home under the Juvenile Justice Act. Police had said the juvenile was most brutal among all the accused.

Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Yogesh Khanna, while convicting the accused, relied on the dying declaration of the victim, forensic evidence, DNA samples and other medical reports of the convicts, electronic evidence and their statements given to the police after their arrests. The ASJ said the presence of the convicts in the bus in which the crime was committed has been established through the location of their mobile networks. The court will hear the arguments on the quantum of sentence on Wednesday. The murder charges, under which the accused have been convicted, entails a minimum punishment of life sentence and the maximum death.

The court also ruled that the victim did not die of medical negligence. Khanna rejected the defence argument that the girl did not die of injuries inflicted on her by the accused and instead succumbed to medical negligence and delay in rushing her to the hospital.

The case had led to large number of protests across the country and it forced the government to change rape laws and make them more stringent. The role of the juvenile in the case had also started debates on the Juvenile Justice Act, according to which the maximum punishment a juvenile can get for any offence is three years in a probation home.