In what can be described as some measure of justice to the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case victim, all four death row convicts were hanged till death at thirty minutes past five on Friday morning. While it has brought some sense of closure, the entire country had to face a great deal of agony on account of the highly unethical and inhuman behaviour of the lawyers defending the convicts who had committed the ghastly crime.
Of late, it is AP Singh, the lawyer from three out of four convicts, who has given a lot of agony to the entire country and particularly the mother of the victim, Asha Devi who had at one point even gone on to lament, “The convicts’ lawyer challenged me that their execution will not happen for an indefinite period…”
Exploiting loopholes in the legal system, the defence lawyers adopted dilatory tactics- using legal remedies available to them to delay the execution till as long as possible even as the mother of Nirbhaya cried her eyes out for justice delayed, which finally arrived seven and half years after the ghastly crime was committed in the National Capital.
The death row convicts filed their curative petitions, mercy petitions and judicial review to the rejection of mercy petitions at different times, rather than filing them jointly and thus exploiting legal loopholes in a manipulative manner. Their lawyers knew that under the present system, where there are multiple death row convicts, one of them cannot be hanged individually. Thus, the fate of their legal remedies was delayed manipulatively.
Even after it became clear that the Nirbhaya case death row convicts would be sent to the gallows, A P Singh’s sick mentality was at display all over again, even as he indulged in victim bashing questioning Nirbhaya and her mother over why the victim was out at 12.30 AM.
Adv AP Singh spitting poison again on Nirbhaya and her mother. Questions why she was out at 12.30 am without the information of her mother.
As per him- A Rapist has human rights but a female cannot have any.Shameless person.#PunishAPSingh pic.twitter.com/cSaDdeFVza
— Chaitaney Mor (@chaitaney) March 19, 2020
But then A P Singh has always been making such irresponsible remarks, trying to blame the victim for the ghastly crime. He reeks of the same mentality that is manifested by his clients. Outside the Court, he has been constantly uttering remarks laced with misogyny and bordering on sociopathy.
He had even said, “If my daughter or sister engaged in pre-marital sex and disgraced herself and allowed herself to lose face and character by doing such things, I would most certainly take this sort of sister or daughter to my farmhouse, and in front of my entire family, I would put petrol on her and set her on fire.”
Other defence lawyer, M L Sharma has been equally pernicious in his utterances. He had gone on to say that in the Indian society, “we never allow our girls to come out from the house after 6.30 or 7.30 or 8.30 in the evening with any unknown person.” He had also said that a woman is “just like a flower” and thus “always needs protection”.
Repeating the wrong precedent set during the 2015 Yakub Memon case, when the entire left-liberal ecosystem had resorted to midnight hearing in the Supreme Court to somehow save the 1993 Mumbai blasts, convict, terrorist Yakub Memon from getting hanged, A P Singh too approached the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court for midnight hearings.
Unfortunately, the mother of the victim had to wait till midnight even at the eleventh hour in her fight to get justice for her daughter. Throughout this case, the defence lawyers have inflicted immense agony upon the family of the victim and even the entire society, making remarks that are as shameful as the ghastly incident.
This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue and erratic, manipulative lawyers should not be given a license to abuse the process of Court. In fact, Additional Sessions Judge Dharmender Rana- the Court that issued the death warrant also came down heavily on M L Sharma. He slammed the counsel for scheming to obtain relief for his clients and directed the Bar Council of India to take note of the matter that the counsel is “sensitised”.
The Courts are overburdened and as such rapists and terrorists have no right to resort to midnight hearings. The Bar Council must strongly take cognizance of this matter and make it a point that the two erratic lawyers- A P Singh and M L Sharma are taken to task for their gross misconduct, shameful remarks unbecoming of a lawyer and dilatory tactics, including before the President of India and the Supreme Court.
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