In a significant ruling, the Bombay High Court on Monday upheld the constitutional validity of a provision introduced post the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape case, allowing life imprisonment or death penalty to repeat convicts in rape cases, and dismissed the petitions filed by three convicts in the sensational Shakti Mill gangrape case of 2013.

Bombay High Court upholds the constitutional validity of IPC Section 376E. The law was challenged by the three convicts of Shakti Mills gang rape, who were sentenced to death by a Sessions Court in 2014, for the gang-rape of a Mumbai's photojournalist.

— ANI (@ANI) June 3, 2019

Delivering the judgment, a division bench of justices B P Dharmadhikari and Revati Mohite Dere observed that the offence of rape was, in a sense, graver than murder. The three convicts in the Shakti Mill gangrape case had challenged the constitutional validity of section 376(e) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), under which they were sentenced to death for a repeat offence by a sessions court in 2014 -- the first such conviction under the changed law. The three were convicted for raping a 22-year-old photojournalist inside the abandoned Shakti Mills compound in central Mumbai on August 22, 2013 and for raping an 18-year-old telephone operator at the same place some months earlier.