More than seven years after they committed one of the most shocking crimes in India in recent memory, the long arms of the law finally caught up with them.
After literally running out of all the dirty tricks in the book,?Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Kumar Singh?who were convicted for the 2012 gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi were hanged on Friday morning.
The four convicts were executed together in what is probably the first simultaneous hangings in the history of Independent India.
The executions were carried out by?Pawan Jallad, the hangman from Meerut?inside the Tihar Jail on Friday morning at 5:30 am and the deaths were confirmed at 6 am.
The four men were hanged on Friday morning after the last ditch efforts by their lawyers failed. The lawyers had approached the HC and SC which in an unusual move heard the pleas at night and rejected.
The executions also bring an end to the quest for the family if the 23-year-old who had been fighting for justice for their daughter all these years.
Since 2013 the family, her father?Badrinath and mother Asha Devi have quite literally knocked on the doors of every court in this country pleading for justice for their daughter.
"Finally they have been hanged, it was a long struggle. Today we got justice, this day is dedicated to the daughters of the country. I thank the judiciary and government. Our daughter is no more and won't return.We started this fight after she left us, this struggle was for her but we will continue this fight in future for our daughters. I hugged my daughter's picture and said 'finally you got justice'" Asha Devi said.
Despite a trial court sentencing the four men to death in 2013 after the case was fast-tracked and tried in record time the family had to wait for over seven years to see the monsters who violently mutilated and murdered their daughter for no fault of hers executed finally.
This is because the lawyer of the convicts, initially ML Sharma and later AP Singh quite literally took advantage of all the possible loopholes in the laws and mounted legal challenges one after the other.
One of the tricks the lawyer used to the maximum effect was filing appeals one by one, which meant even after the petition of one of the convicts was thrown out, he went to the same court with the petition of the other three, which also met with the same fate. But all this while he managed to buy time for the convicts, making a mockery of the anguish of the victim's family.?
Advocate Singh tried this delay tactic even after the death warrant was issued against them earlier this year and managed to get the death warrant deferred not once but thrice. Even after they ran out of legal remedied the culprits made a futile attempt to stay the hangings by approaching the ICJ, which has no jurisdiction over such cases.
Even though the four men have finally been executed, it is seen a failure of the country's legal system to give justice to the victim. Adding to this is the fact that one of the culprits is still roaming around somewhere, as a free man, because he escaped the gallows as he was tried as a juvenile. He was just a few months short of turning 18 at the time of the crime, but was tired under Juvenile Justice Act and was released from a correction home in December 2015.