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Delhi's Saket District Court on Friday reserved an order on the pronouncement of the quantum of sentence in the murder case of TV journalist Soumya Vishwanathan in 2008.
"Pronouncement of the verdict on sentence in the Soumya Vishwanathan murder case to passed tomorrow," said the trial Judge Ravindra Kumar Pandey after detailed arguments on Friday. The court noted that Delhi's legal service authority (DLSA) has submitted verification report affidavits of convicts report submitted. During the arguements, the Public prosecutor told the Court that apart from Amit Shukla the DLSA has given a "satisfactory" report of conduct in jail. "However, a report from the Jail superintendent has shown "unsatisfactory conduct" by three of the five convicts and multiple penalties on them. We don't know how the DLSA report and Jail report are different," the public prosecutor said. The lawyer for the accused objected and submitted that they were disputing their own report. "The punishment report that they have to see is of the last year in which they were in custody. They cannot raise issues of the last 14 years. The DLSA officials are trained officers. They cannot dispute their report," the lawyer said. Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Ravindra Kumar Pandey earlier directed the secretary of DLSA to file the verification report by the next date. However, the pre-sentence report was filed by the probation officer on the last date. On October 26, the court called for a pre-sentence report (PSR) before hearing the quantum of the sentence. The principal secretary of the Delhi government was directed to assign to any Probationary Officer (PO) for the task of submitting the PSR. Additional Sessions Judge Pandey had earlier convicted four accused namely Ravi Kapoor, Ajay Kumar, Baljeet Malik and Amit Shukla for the offence of murder and running a crime syndicate under MCOCA of Saumya Vishwanathan. Another accused Ajay Sethi was convicted of earning the proceeds of crime. Soumya Vishwanathan was shot dead on September 30, 2008, while returning home from work in her car around 3:30 AM. Police had claimed robbery was the motive behind her killing. (ANI)
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