‘Hang my son, he deserves it’

[OkToBeTakei]

Bumping as the verdict is in.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/s ... men-guilty

Four men have been convicted for their roles in the gang-rape and murder of a young woman in a moving bus in Delhi last year.

Judge Yogesh Khanna delivered the judgment this morning shortly after noon local time at the district court of Saket in south Delhi. The men will be sentenced on Wednesday.

The men are likely to face death by hanging, though life imprisonment is a possibility. Their lawyers said yesterday they would appeal.

The trial of the men, aged between 19 and 34, started in January. One defendant, a bus driver, hanged himself in prison on March. The oldest of the six men accused of the attack on the 23-year-old physiotherapy student, he was alleged by police to have been the ringleader. The youngest among the alleged attackers, who was 17 at the time of the assault, was tried separately and was last month sentenced to three years in a juvenile reform home — the maximum possible punishment under Indian law.

The incident, which took place on a Sunday night in Delhi in December 2012, provoked outrage in India with protests across the country. It also led to an unprecedented national discussion about sexual violence and calls for widespread changes in cultural attitudes and policing, and legal reform. The international imaged of the country was damaged, with numbers of women tourists dropping significantly.

Police have said the juvenile convicted last month was the most violent of the attackers of the girl.

Singh, the victim's father, told the Guardian earlier this year that the family would push for a harsher sentence by any means possible in India and internationally.

I really hope they are successful.

[OkToBeTakei]

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/delhi-gang-rap ... ml#C4As1DV

Four men have been sentenced to death for the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi.

A judge said Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh should be hanged after they were convicted of the brutal attack.

In his 230-page judgement, Yogesh Khanna said the severity of the crime meant it fell into the "rarest of rare" category, telling the men: "We cannot turn a blind eye towards such a gruesome crime. There cannot be any tolerance.

[Burris]

Culture and family can negatively influence someone, and even officially support that individual in committing various crimes – against women, against men, against humanity – but an individual, regardless of culture, regardless of circumstance, is still responsible for his or her own behavior.

(If families were put on trial for the crimes of their kin, one could end up with the sort of legal situation that exists in North Korea.)

The parents of the rapists may have made poor choices in what to teach those men, but the individuals who committed that crime – including the 17-year-old – were old enough to make their own decisions. They could have more easily not gang-raped someone to death on a bus. To do the crime required am act of will on each of their parts.

The people responsible for that rape are the rapists themselves. At least their families repudiated them this time – even if the condemnation is self-serving. (If the rape had taken place in the course of a war, for example, their families would have been thanking them for the service. That’s actually a whole lot worse to see.)