Four men sentenced to death for a gang-rape and murder on a Delhi bus in 2012 that shocked the nation were given a week on Wednesday to exercise their remaining legal options. Their brutal attack on Jyoti Singh sparked weeks of demonstrations, shining a spotlight on the dismal plight of women and alarming rates of sexual violence in 21st-century India.
The hangings have already been postponed twice and Delhi High Court judge Suresh Kumar Kait said that the men have played India’s slow legal system long enough. “It cannot be disputed that the convicts have frustrated the process by using delaying tactics,” Kait observed, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. He also said that they must be hanged at the same time as per the law, after the government applied for them to be executed separately. The men were initially handed the death sentence in 2013. A fifth, the suspected ringleader, was found dead in jail in a suspected suicide, while a 17-year-old accomplice spent three years in a juvenile detention centre. While two of the convicts have exercised their final legal options, the remaining two have yet to do so. Their options include pleas to the Supreme Court and mercy petitions to the president.
