After Sealdah Additional Sessions Judge Anirban Das on Saturday found Kolkata Police civic volunteer Sanjoy Roy guilty of the rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, all are eagerly waiting for the quantum of punishment to be announced on Monday.
The maximum punishment for the crimes committed is the death penalty, while the minimum sentence is life imprisonment. The judge, in an open court, informed Sanjoy Roy that the death penalty was an option for offences proved under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections 64, 66 and 103(1). “It may be a life term or even death, given the way you throttled and killed the victim,” the judge said.
But, till the very end, Roy insisted he was innocent and had been falsely implicated in the case.
Billwadal Bhattacharya, a senior counsel at the Calcutta High Court, told The Indian Express that a lot of questions regarding the August 9 incident still remained unanswered given that “there is no further investigation and this person has been made the sole convict”.
“The death penalty is given in the rarest of rare cases. There cannot be any second thoughts on the fact that this was one of the most heinous forms of crime against a woman. It was done in a beastly manner. The way the young doctor was murdered, and the torture that was inflicted on her, definitely fits the rarest of rare cases, which very well warrants the death penalty,” he said.
Bhattacharya also raised questions about the investigation. “Initially, there were allegations that the police were trying to botch up the investigation. There were a lot of loopholes, which is why the matter got transferred to the CBI by the Calcutta High Court. But the question is, was it done only by this particular person who has been convicted? Now, a lot of questions will remain unanswered.”
He added, “In our country, the legal system grants an opportunity to appeal against the order of conviction given by the lower court. This will take time…”
Another senior counsel at the high court, Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee, said that Roy has been declared guilty on the basis of documents collected as circumstantial evidence or statements of eyewitnesses.
“In this case, he has been declared guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence. I do not know what is the weight and value of the circumstantial evidence, but at the same time, it has to be appreciated that the immense pressure of the public has played a vital role in this case,” he told The Indian Express.
Reflecting on the Kamduni case of 2013, he said, “Due to the pressure of society, seven persons were given the death penalty; one person died during trial, and six persons faced the trial. They appealed in the high court, and we saw that four people came out and two people got life terms. Not a single one got the death penalty, because the witnesses and evidence were weak.”
Chatterjee said the death penalty was the only option. “But I feel there are some doubts in the trial. In the lower court, a death sentence will be given, but when the case goes to the high court or the Supreme Court, I do not know what the fate of this case will be.”
Advocate Kaustav Bagchi, another counsel at the Calcutta High Court, noted that the trial was in-camera and said the question of the death penalty would definitely arise. “But what we are all more concerned with is that apart from Sanjoy, there are more perpetrators of the crime and they need to be booked. We hope and believe that this trial has not been a shabby or a shoddy trial. We hope that the sentence given to Sanjoy will not be overturned by a higher court,” he told The Indian Express.
The verdict was delivered 162 days after the on-duty postgraduate trainee doctor was raped and murdered on the premises of the hospital in Kolkata. The CBI counsel has termed the crime as the rarest of rare during the trial.