The Delhi High Court upheld the death sentence of four men convicted for gang-raping and murdering a 23-year-old student in New Delhi.
 
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The Delhi High Court Thursday upheld the death sentence of four men guilty of gang-raping and murdering a 23-year-old student in New Delhi in 2012, in a violent attack, the horror of which ricocheted around India and across the globe.
A two-judge bench said the crime qualified as “the rarest of rare,” and so merited the death sentence, A.P. Singh, a lawyer for two convicts, said.
A 1980 Supreme Court ruling allowed the death penalty in murder cases where the “collective conscience of the community is so shocked that it will expect the holders of the judicial power to inflict death penalty.”
In September, a lower court had sentenced the men to death for an attack that it said “shocked the collective conscious of India.”
“In these times when crime against women is on the rise, courts cannot turn a blind eye toward such gruesome crime,” Judge Yogesh Khanna wrote in his 237-page judgment. “There cannot be any tolerance,” he had added at the time. Defense lawyers later moved to Delhi’s High Court to challenge that ruling, arguing the men had been falsely implicated.

More In Delhi-Rape

In his judgment, Judge Khanna said that on Dec. 16, 2012, the men lured the young woman and her male friend onto a bus. Then, they raped her repeatedly, at times with an iron rod, and later dumped them along a highway, naked and bleeding. Her injuries were so severe that she died as a result two weeks after the attack. The woman’s male friend – who accompanied her aboard the bus – was also severely beaten, the judgment noted.
The assault transfixed India with its brutality and led to nationwide protests calling for better policing and harsher punishments for violent crimes against women. India’s Parliament – in response to calls for reforms — passed legislation raising the maximum punishment for rape from life imprisonment to the death penalty, as well as criminalizing offenses such as stalking and voyeurism.
Women’s rights advocates say public discussion in the aftermath of the crime chipped away at the stigma associated with sex crimes, as well as the way some victims of assaults perceived themselves. In Delhi alone for instance, more than 1,500 rapes were reported in 2013 – the highest in over a decade – and up from 706 in 2012. Harassment reports jumped fivefold from the 2012 figure. Delhi police say the increase isn’t due to rising crime rates, but to women’s newfound willingness to report abuse.
Speaking to reporters outside court, the young woman’s father said he was happy judges had upheld the lower court ruling. Mr. Singh, the defense lawyer, said he would move to Supreme Court to challenge the High Court judgment. “The wrong people have been convicted,” he said. “We will keep fighting.”