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Mukarrab etc. v. State of U.P.

Criminal Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Criminal Appeal Nos. 1119-1120 of 2016)Decided 30 Nov 2016
Criminal Appeal Nos. 1119-1120 of 2016
Justice A.K. Sikri · Justice R. Banumathi

Background

In 1994, the appellants Mukarrab and Arshad, along with four others, were convicted of murdering a man named Azamul Haq in Moradabad district, following a quarrel, and were sentenced to life imprisonment under Section 302 IPC. The Allahabad High Court upheld their conviction in 2014, and the Supreme Court had already dismissed the other four co-accused's appeals at the admission stage. Mukarrab and Arshad separately raised a claim before the Supreme Court that they were actually juveniles at the time of the offence and so should be dealt with under juvenile justice law rather than as adult convicts, and the Court examined this claim through medical age-determination evidence (ossification/radiological tests).

Decision Breakdown

The Court found the medical board's 2016 opinion estimating the appellants' age as 35-40 years to be unreliable on its own (ossification tests are not infallible), but it cross-checked the juvenility claim against independent evidence: a long history of other criminal cases filed against each appellant going back to 1988 (Mukarrab) and 1993 (Arshad). The Court reasoned that if the appellants' claimed birth year (1979) were true, they would have been children as young as 9-14 years old when those earlier cases were registered, and would then have been visibly treated as "children" by courts at the time, which did not happen. Concluding the juvenility claim could not be substantiated by cogent evidence, the Court rejected it and dismissed both appellants' appeals, upholding their murder conviction and life sentence.

Lesson Learnt

A claim of juvenility made years after an offence cannot rest solely on a medical ossification test, which courts treat as inherently approximate; corroborating documentary or circumstantial evidence (such as how the person was treated in other contemporaneous legal proceedings) will be weighed heavily, and a late, unsupported juvenility claim can fail even in a serious criminal case.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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