The Delhi High Court, on Monday, granted bail to four convicts serving life imprisonment in the murder case of TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan. Justices Suresh Kumar Kait and Manoj Jain suspended the sentence of Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Singh Malik, and Ajay Kumar till the pendency of their appeals challenging their conviction and sentence. Notably, the bench took into account that the convicts had been in custody for 14 years.
The HC had earlier directed the Delhi Police, on January 23, to respond to the appeals filed by the four convicts. Vishwanathan, an employee of a leading English news channel, was fatally shot on September 30, 2008, on Nelson Mandela Marg in south Delhi while returning home from work. A special court, on November 26, 2023, had awarded two life terms to the convicts under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 3(1)(i) (committing organized crime resulting in the death of any person) of the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA). The court specified that the sentences would run consecutively.
The fifth convict, Ajay Sethi, received three years of simple imprisonment under Section 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) of the IPC. The court set off the three-year sentence against the time Sethi had already served, considering his 14 years in custody during the trial for offenses related to abetting organized crime and receiving proceeds of organized crime.
Counsel for Kapoor argued that he had been in custody for over 14 years and nine months, urging the court to suspend his sentence during the appeal. Similar pleas were made by the counsel representing Shukla, Malik, and Ajay Kumar.
The trial court had imposed double life imprisonment and fines of Rs 1.25 lakh on each for Kapoor, Shukla, Malik, and Kumar, along with a higher fine of Rs 7.25 lakh on Sethi. Recently, the high court denied parole to Kapoor, considering the gravity of his offenses.
Kapoor, Shukla, and Malik were also convicted in the 2009 Jigisha Ghosh murder case. They confessed to being involved in Vishwanathan’s murder, citing robbery as the motive. While the trial court initially awarded death sentences to Kapoor and Shukla, the high court commuted them to life imprisonment and upheld Malik’s life sentence.