New Delhi: Twenty years after the crime was committed, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider a man’s plea that he was a juvenile when the incident occurred and therefore, he could not have been jailed for seven years as an adult.
In a rare order, the top court indicated it was open to examining the plea and not dismiss it on the grounds that 20 years had passed and that the two subordinate courts had also convicted the man as a major under the charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
A bench of Justices Kurian Joseph and MM Shanatanagoudar gave liberty to the accused’s counsel to adduce the birth certificate to corroborate the claim that he was a juvenile at the time of the crime in question and should have been dealt under the juvenile justice law instead of IPC.
“The learned counsel for the petitioner claims the juvenality at the time of the commission of offence on 5thFebruary, 1998. He claims that his date of birth is 9th February, 1980. The petitioner is directed to produce the birth certificate issued by the Registrar of Birth and Death and also the details of the members of his family,” stated the Court order.
The bench gave the petitioner six weeks to come back with a proof of his age.
The man was sentenced to seven years in jail for hitting with a stick an old man, who intervened when the former was allegedly beating his mother on February 5, 1998. The old man later died of the head injuries. In April 1999, the accused was convicted by a court in Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh under Section 304 for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
In October 2017, the Allahabad High Court upheld the conviction and sentence in view of the direct evidence of the assault.
Notably, the only defence adopted by the accused before the trial court and the High Court was lack of motive but no arguments were made on the point of juvenility.
Comments
0 comment