Within 24 hours of a Sealdah court sentencing Sanjoy Roy to life imprisonment for the rape and murder of a junior doctor at RG Kar Hospital on August 9 last year, the West Bengal government on Tuesday approached the Calcutta HC to challenge the trial court’s order.
The government’s swift move comes after CM Mamata Banerjee publicly announcing that she was “not satisfied” with the life imprisonment sentence and her government would file an appeal in the HC seeking death penalty.
Advocate General Kishore Datta mentioned the matter on Tuesday before the Division Bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Md Shabbar Rashidi, and sought the court’s permission to file an appeal challenging the order passed by the trial court.
Dutta told the court they were not satisfied with the life imprisonment sentence and would seek capital punishment.
The Bench allowed the Advocate General to file the appeal. Sources said that once the official formalities are over and the filing of the appeal is complete, the hearing in the matter will begin in the High Court.
Additional Sessions Judge Anirban Das of the Sealdah court while sentencing Sanjoy Roy to life imprisonment “till his last breath”, said it was not the “rarest of rare case”.
Meanwhile, Banerjee Tuesday reiterated that she was not satisfied with the sentencing and advocated harsher punishment for heinous crimes.
“In the RG Kar case, we had called for capital punishment. Jodi keu danobik, jodi keu pasobik hoy, samaj ki manobik hote pare? (If someone is a monster, then how can society show humanity?) The society must be made humane towards our mothers and sisters,” she said in Malda district.
She said: “What is the meaning of a life sentence? In many cases, culprits are released on parole in two or three years even after committing heinous crimes… I am truly shocked by the judgment in the RG Kar case … I did not like the judgment saying ‘it is not the rarest of rare cases’. I think it is indeed the rarest of rare, sensitive, and heinous crimes…”
Meanwhile, responding to the government’s decision to move HC, the victim’s father said, “Whatever the CM has done till date, she should not do anything more. This is our request. She can say a lot of things but she only tampered with evidence. The then (Kolkata Police) CP and others had tampered with the evidence. Did she not see all that from the beginning?”