New Delhi: The Supreme Court will hear on Thursday the plea of Vinay Sharma, a convict in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case.

The hearing is scheduled to take place at 10:30 am. The bench of Justice R Banumathi will hear the case. Vinay has filed the petition in the top court against President Ram Nath Kovind's decision to reject his mercy plea.

Vinay, one of the four convicts in the Nirbhaya case, challenged the President's decision to dismiss his mercy petition in the apex court on Tuesday.

The convict, through his lawyer AP Singh, has requested the death penalty to be commuted to life imprisonment.

On February 1, Vinay's mercy petition was rejected by the President.

On January 31, the death sentence of four convicts Mukesh Singh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Thakur were stayed by a lower court till further orders.

All the four convicts are currently lodged in Tihar Jail.

Pawan has not exhausted all his legal remedies as he has not filed curative and mercy petitions till now. 

The Delhi high court had, on last Wednesday (Feb 5), granted a week's time to the four death row convicts to avail all legal remedies available to them and said that the convicts cannot be hanged separately since they were convicted for the same crime.

The case pertains to the gang rape and brutal murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by six people, including a juvenile, in Delhi. The woman had died at a Singapore hospital a few days later.

One of the five adults accused, Ram Singh, had allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail during the trial of the case, while the juvenile was sent to a reform centre and released after three years.