Minor convicted in India gang rape released after 3 years

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Minor convicted in India gang rape released after 3 years
MUNEEZA NAQVI, Associated Press

NEW DELHI (AP) — A man convicted as a juvenile in the fatal 2012 gang rape of a young woman aboard a moving bus in India's capital ended his three-year term in a reform home Sunday, as angry protesters demanded that he remain in detention.

The man was short of his 18th birthday when he and five others brutally attacked the 23-year-old woman in a case that shocked India, where sexual violence against women is rampant.

Several activists and politicians have demanded that he not be released until it can be proven that he has been reformed. Scores of protesters Sunday were led by the parents of the woman who was attacked.

On Friday, the Delhi High Court rejected a petition to extend the man's term, saying that he has served the maximum sentence allowed under the law. India's top court is set to hear another such petition Monday.

News reports said the man was moved Sunday from the reform home where he had been kept to a new home under the care of a children's rights group.

Police eventually broke up the protests Sunday, removing the demonstrators from central New Delhi in buses.

The December 2012 attack in the heart of New Delhi sparked outrage across India and highlighted the issue of violence against women in the country.

The woman and a male friend were returning home from seeing a movie at an upscale mall when they were tricked by the attackers into getting on the bus, which the men had taken out for a joyride.

The attackers beat the victim's friend and took turns raping her. They penetrated her with a rod, leaving severe internal injuries that led to her death two weeks later.

Four men were convicted of rape and murder in an unusually fast trial for India's chaotic justice system, and legal appeals against their death sentences are pending in the Supreme Court. A fifth man involved in the case died in prison.

The four adults who went to trial confessed to the attack but later retracted their confessions, saying they'd been tortured into admitting their involvement.

In response to the attack and the widespread public protests it provoked, India's government rushed through legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.

The case also ignited a debate about whether minors who commit especially horrific crimes should be tried as adults.

New legislation to lower the age for young people to be tried as juveniles from 18 to 16 is currently stuck in India's Parliament.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-12-21

[Habs]

Should of hung him........

[fred110]

He should get everything that poor girl got. I hope the girl's family takes care of it.

[hansgruber]

Vigilante justice might come his way.

[carter1882]

There are laws in place in all civilised societies to protect minors and give them substantially reduced sentences. This is only right and proper. Whether that age should be reduced in cases such as this is for legislators to decide not the hang em high brigade after the fact. Many would have liked to have seen the hanging of the perpetrators of the appalling crime committed against two year old James Bulger in Liverpool. They were barely over ten when they led him to a railway line in broad daylight , tortured him and left him to die. Even his attackers are now free to live their albeit changed identity lives which in my view is the correct reaction of the law. Minors need protection themselves and from the consequences of their own actions also. Those who might seek to end that may as well go back to a society that prevailed, say, in Victorian Britain.