Doctor gets life term for killing her twin babies

NEW DELHI: A Delhi court found a

doctor

guilty of fatally injecting her minor twins with anaesthesia before trying to commit suicide and awarded her life imprisonment on Wednesday. The accused was employed as a gynaecologist in a government hospital and had pleaded temporary insanity arising from depression for the

crime

.

Additional sessions judge

Pawan Kumar Matto

held the 40-year-old woman doctor guilty under Section 302 (murder) and 309 (attempted suicide) of the Indian Penal Code. "I hold the accused Roopa Singh guilty of the murders of baby Tanya and Twinkle by way of repeatedly injecting Sucol and such act of commission of murder or attempt to commit suicide cannot be justified after any such altercation at home of the accused,” said Matto.

The incident dates back to July 2009 when Singh left her Rohini home and booked a room for the night at a hotel following a heated discussion with her doctor husband. Differences had arisen between the couple over her plan to set up her own nursing home. Following the tiff, Singh hired a taxi and drove to the hotel with her daughters, stopping on the way to buy syringes and Sucol injection, a muscle relaxant used during anaesthesia.

Public prosecutor Pankaj Ranga claimed that Singh injected her twin daughters with the anaesthetic substance in the hotel fully aware that it was fatal for them. He said the accused then injected herself with the same medicine with the intention to kill herself.

In a groggy state while under the influence of the injection, she phoned her husband. After finally making out what his wife was saying, the man rushed to the alleged crime scene and found the daughters dead and his wife unconscious. Tanya and Twinkle, identical twins, were declared brought dead at

Max Hospital

, when they had been taken along with their mother.

The viscera and samples of the minors and the contents of their mother's stomach wash were sent for examination to identify the killer substance and its dosage. The prosecution sought capital punishment on the ground of the victims’ tender age and because the mother had shown no mercy. At the time of the incident, Singh was a senior resident at Dr

Bhim Rao Ambedkar Hospital

in Rohini.

The defence case was that the woman was overburdened with work. Singh’s counsel cited the discharge certificated after her release from hospital that mentioned she was depressive. The defence also admitted into evidence the statement of a senior mental health expert who opined that the doctor must have been suffering from severe depression in the period at least a week prior to the killing of her daughters. Besides, the defence counsel pointed out, the accused had four-year-old daughter and no previous criminal record.

Some of the oral statements made before the court did establish that Singh was very meticulous in her work but was visibly overburdened. “Courts must not only keep in view the rights of the criminals, but also the rights of the victims of crime and the society at large while considering the imposition of appropriate punishment,” the judge noted. Considering the ages of the victims, the court held that it was not a rarest of rare cases, but ordered, “Convict is sentenced to undergo rigorous imprisonment for life under Section 302 and is also directed to pay a fine of Rs 30,000...She is also sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and fine of Rs 5,000 under Section 309.”