Team News Riveting
Kolkata, January 20
The life sentence to Sanjay Roy for the rape and murder of a postgraduate trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College had outraged doctors and activists.
The agitators have held continuous protest after the 31-year-old doctor’s brutalised body was discovered at the state-run hospital on August 9 last year.
Additional District and Sessions Judge Anirban Das on Saturday convicted Sanjay Roy, a Kolkata Police civic volunteer, in the crime. The court had pronounced him guilty under Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita’s sections 64 (punishment for rape), 66 (punishment for causing death) and 103 (punishment for murder). The judge said the evidence produced by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) that started the probe on the orders of the Calcutta high court was compelling enough and pronounced him guilty.
The CBI lawyer pleaded for the highest penalty for the convict, calling the crime “rarest of the rare”.
On Monday, the Judge sentenced Roy to life imprisonment till death and ordered the Bengal government to pay Rs 17 lakh as compensation to the victim’s parents.
The court ruled that the crime did not meet the “rarest of the rare” criterion reserved for capital punishment in the country.
“An on-duty doctor was raped and murdered at her workplace and the court says it is not rarest of rare? When and where has such a crime happened before? At least I have not heard about an incident like this,” Aniket Mahato, a junior doctor at RG Kar and a prominent face of the protests, told reporters. He said the doctors would continue their protest till justice was done.
“The protest will go on even in future because our demands are clear: who are the others involved in this case? Why is the supplementary chargesheet not being filed? Why are criminal proceedings not being taken up against Sandip Ghosh? We need answers to these questions as well. We are not satisfied with this sentence as we wish to know the motive behind this and who is being hidden by the supplementary chargesheet not being filed,” he said.