The Sealdah Civil and Criminal Court in Kolkata on Monday handed a life sentence to Sanjay Roy, a former civic police volunteer convicted for the rape and murder of a 31-year-old doctor at the city’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, reported the Hindustan Times.

The court held Roy guilty of the crime on Saturday.

The Central Bureau of Investigation and the victim’s family had sought the death penalty for Roy. The court on Monday asked the West Bengal government to pay Rs 17 lakh to the family.

The 31-year-old trainee doctor was found dead on the state-run hospital’s premises on August 9. The incident sparked protests across the country.

For several weeks, the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front led protests demanding the resignation of senior officials and an end to the “threat culture” in West Bengal’s medical centres.

Roy was arrested by the Kolkata Police on August 10, the day after the body of the doctor was discovered in the hospital's seminar room.

Three days later, the Calcutta High Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the matter.

The court had held a daily trial after a chargesheet was filed in the matter on October 7. Roy told the court that he was not involved in the incident and claimed that he was innocent.

After protests erupted in August seeking justice for the trainee doctor, the Kolkata Police imposed prohibitory orders barring the assembly of a crowd outside the medical institute for several days. On August 15, a mob of 5,000 to 7,000 persons broke into and vandalised the hospital premises. The protestors, including doctors, were attacked by the mob.

Healthcare services across West Bengal were impacted for several weeks as protesting doctors at state-run hospitals held a strike against the incident.

The Central Bureau of Investigation is separately looking into alleged tampering of evidence in the case, and alleged corruption at the medical facility. The persons accused in the case include the hospital’s former principal Sandip Ghosh and an ex-officer-in-charge of the Tala police station, among others.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee expressed dissatisfaction with the sentence awarded. “Case was forcibly taken from Kolkata Police, had it been with them, it would have ensured death sentence,” she was quoted as saying by PTI.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s publicity chief Amit Malviya called the court’s decision a “travesty of justice”.

“West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee must stop shielding the criminal,” Malviya further said on social media. “Agencies also need to investigate the role of the then Kolkata Commissioner and the Chief Minister in the destruction of evidence.”

Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat compared the development to a Kerala court’s decision on Monday to award the death penalty to a 24-year-old woman found guilty of murdering her partner in 2022.

Karat cited the difference in punishment as evidence of the law’s failure to deliver justice for crimes against women, especially rape and murder.

“In the RG Kar case, at every phase and stage, we are seeing injustice,” Karat further said according to ANI. “The main accountability must be with the state government and the way that it has tried to conceal the facts of this case.”

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