The parents of an Indian trainee doctor who was raped and murdered at a Kolkata hospital last year say they are "shocked" that their daughter's killer escaped the death penalty. Sanjay Roy was sentenced to life imprisonment.
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00:00This judgement came as a surprise for many people here in India.
00:07Sanjay Roy was convicted on Saturday of raping and murdering a 31-year-old female trainee
00:12doctor while she took a nap in a seminar hall at her Kolkata hospital last August.
00:19And yesterday he was sentenced to life in prison until his death.
00:24But he had been facing the death penalty and many people here thought that he would be
00:28given that.
00:29India's criminal law system has a doctrine known as the rarest of rare and it refers
00:34to cases that are deemed so abhorrent or so out of the ordinary compared to other crimes
00:40that they warrant the person who's been convicted of getting the death penalty.
00:45And India's Central Bureau of Investigation had argued in court that this is one of those
00:50cases, that the rape and murder of a doctor while she was on duty at her hospital should
00:56be deemed rarest of the rare.
00:59But judge Anirban Das of the Kolkata Selda court yesterday rejected that argument and
01:04it's led to a wave of criticism.
01:06Local media reported the woman's parents said they were dismayed and shocked that the circumstances
01:12in which their daughter died wouldn't meet that threshold.
01:15The Chief Minister of West Bengal where the crime occurred, Mamata Banerjee, had also
01:20demanded the death penalty and told reporters after the state was quote, not happy with
01:25the outcome.
01:26And doctors who marched through the streets in protest after the sentence told the ABC
01:32it only amounted to half justice.
01:34They said they'll continue protesting until all of the people involved are punished.
01:39They've long maintained that multiple people would have had to have been involved due to
01:43the extent of the victim's injuries and claim that the investigation was botched.
01:49This sentence was handed down by a lower court so it can be appealed.
01:53Firstly to the Kolkata High Court and then to the Supreme Court of India.
01:58And both the victim's parents and Roy's defence team have indicated that an appeal is an option
02:04they're likely to explore.