The father of lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha, 25, who was killed in 2012, has filed a revision petition before the Bombay High Court seeking enhancement of the life sentence of her killer, Sajjad Mugal Pathan.
The sessions court, in July 2014, convicted Sajjad, a security guard at the building where Purkayastha was staying, of murder, molestation, and criminal trespass and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The sessions court had refused to award the death penalty, as sought by the prosecution, observing that the case was not the "rarest of rare".
The Maharashtra government filed an appeal seeking the death penalty for Sajjad, which was admitted by the HC in 2015.
Pallavi's father, Atanu Purkayastha, had filed a revision application in the HC through advocate Abhishek Yende, stating that the sentence awarded by the sessions court was not proportionate to the "heinousness of the gruesome murder".
On Monday, Atanu Purkayastha filed an application seeking condonation of delay in seeking revision of the sentence. The same was allowed by a division bench of Justices Prasanna Varale and Sharmila Deshmukh and kept the matter for hearing on September 22.
On August 9, 2012, Pallavi, daughter of an IAS officer based in Delhi, was found with her throat slit at her rented sixteenth floor apartment in Himalayan Heights B wing at Wadala. She worked as a legal advisor with actor-director Farhan Akhtar’s firm, Excel Entertainment Private Limited.
She used to stay in the rented flat at Wadala along with her partner, Avik Sengupta. Avik returned home from work and found Purkayastha's body lying in a pool of blood.
The city police arrested Pathan at the Mumbai Central railway terminus before he could catch a train to Surat, from where he had allegedly planned to flee to Jammu and Kashmir, his native state.
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