A British Columbia man convicted of gunning down a Guelph hotel manager in 2016 will remain behind bars, a court ruled in dismissing his appeal.
Raja Dosanjh was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Aly Sunderani following a jury trial in 2019. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Dosanjh sought to have the conviction overturned during a virtual hearing held this past February, which resulted in the dismissal ruling released on Friday.
A three-judge panel considered a variety of error claims made in the appeal, including aspects of the trial judge’s instructions to the jury related to dependence on eyewitness testimony and alleged violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms related to the collection of evidence from a rented vehicle’s data collection system used at trial.
The appeal panel disagreed on both counts.
“I see no error in the trial judge’s approach,” the appeal panel wrote of the latter. “If the appellant had any privacy interest in the vehicle or its data, it was minimal in nature.”
As noted in the appeal decision, Guelph police bought the rental vehicle used in the murder and sent it to be forensically analyzed by the OPP, which garnered information about the vehicle’s locations and routes taken.
Dosanjh shot and killed Sunderani outside the front doors of the Comfort Inn on Woodlawn Road in broad daylight then took off in a car waiting around the corner.
He was arrested a year later in British Columbia.
