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Rape and ordinary men
[DAWN] "YOU can’t clap with one hand," one of the rapists in the notorious Delhi gang rape case had famously said after being convicted of rape and murder. This man, along with five others, had been found guilty of taking a young woman to the back of a Delhi bus one night in December 2012. The men raped the young woman inflicting injuries that were so terrible that the doctors, including those in Singapore, where she was sent for treatment, could not save her. A few weeks after the incident -- after she had identified her assailants and given her statement -- she succumbed to her injuries.Last week, the Supreme Court of India upheld the death sentence handed out by a lower court to five of the men who had raped her. (One escaped the sentence as he was a juvenile at the time of the crime. He spent three years in a correctional facility.) It was an unusual move, according to experts; lower courts in India routinely hand out death sentences but many if not most are overturned on appeal based on some technicality such as shoddy investigation by the law-enforcement authorities. So it was expected it would be the same in this case, some detail or procedural provision invoked to show ’mercy’ to the men. The fact that this did not happen signifies that the highest court in India saw it necessary to uphold the worst possible punishment in a case so grotesque that it saw hundreds of protests across India and headlines around the world. Posted by: Fred 2017-05-10 |
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