A bench of justices Bela M Trivedi and SC Sharma issued notice on the plea filed by the police challenging the order passed by the Delhi high court on February 12.

Additional solicitor general (ASG) SV Raju, appearing for the Delhi Police, informed the bench that the petition filed by the victim’s mother Madhavi Viswanathan has already been entertained by the court in April and sought the present appeals to be heard along with it.

The bench sought responses of the four accused on why the high court’s order should not be set aside and tagged it with the pending appeal of the mother, expected to be heard on July 15.

The high court order had suspended the sentence of the four accused – Ravi Kapoor, Amit Shukla, Baljeet Singh Malik and Ajay Kumar – while granting them bail pending the outcome of their appeals that challenged their conviction and sentence.

The special court which convicted them on November 26, 2023, gave two life terms under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 3(1)(i) (committing organised crime resulting in death) of the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA), with the sentences to run consecutively. There was a fifth convict Ajay Sethi, who was sentenced to three years of simple imprisonment under Section 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) of the IPC.

The high court’s order acknowledged the fact that the accused had undergone 14 years in custody. However, the Delhi Police and the victim’s mother argued that this was a case of double life imprisonment and the accused were members of an organised crime who committed similar crimes. The HC order was also challenged on the ground that it failed to consider the aspect that the convicts will indulge in further crimes if let out on bail as no unique conditions were imposed while granting them release.

Soumya Viswanathan was killed without any apparent cause or provocation and the four men had killed another young woman, Jigisha, nearly six months after Soumya, employed with a prominent English news channel, was fatally shot on September 30, 2008, while driving home from work in south Delhi.

Jigisha, an operations manager with Hewitt Associates in Noida, was strangled to death on March 18, 2009, by the same men. In July 2016, the accused were convicted by a trial court for Jigisha’s murder, but the death sentence awarded to two of them — Kapoor and Shukla — was commuted to life sentence by the Delhi high court in 2018. The court upheld the life imprisonment of the third convict, Malik.