4 Sentenced to Death in Rape Case That Riveted India

Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Police personnel standing guard outside the Saket court complex in New Delhi on Friday where the death sentence to the convicts in the Delhi gang rape case was given.

Four men convicted of a brutal gang rape were sentenced Friday to die by hanging, “a decision met with grim satisfaction from the victim’s parents and triumphant cheers” from the crowd outside the courthouse in Delhi, where some held up pictures of bodies in nooses, Ellen Barry wrote in The New York Times.

The four men - a fruit vendor, a bus attendant, a gym handyman and an unemployed man - were found guilty on Tuesday of raping a young woman on a moving bus last December, inflicting grave internal injuries, then dumping her out on the roadside, Ms. Barry wrote.

But until the last minute it was unclear whether this would lead to death sentences in a country where “liberal and populist impulses have strained against one another for decades, reserving the death sentences for the rarest of rare cases,” she wrote. READ MORE