Om Prakash @ Israel @ Raju @ Raju Das v. Union of India
Background
The appellant was convicted of murder for an offence committed in 1994 and sentenced to death, with the trial court treating him as an adult based on the fact that he had once opened a bank account. He had, in fact, been about 14 years old at the time and repeatedly raised a claim of juvenility (through appeal, review, a curative petition, a mercy petition, and a subsequent writ petition) supported by school records and a jail-ordered ossification test, all of which indicated he was a minor at the time of the offence. His death sentence was eventually commuted by the President to life imprisonment, but his juvenility claim was never properly examined on its merits, and he ultimately spent close to 25 years in prison.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that Section 9(2) of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 allows a claim of juvenility to be raised "at any stage," including after a conviction has become final, and that the courts and executive at every earlier stage had failed to properly examine this constitutional and statutory protection. Accepting the unrebutted school and medical evidence that the appellant was a juvenile at the time of the offence, the Court set aside the sentence to the extent it exceeded what the juvenile justice law permits, while leaving the underlying conviction undisturbed, and ordered his immediate release. It also directed the state legal services authority to help him reintegrate into society after nearly a quarter-century in custody.
Lesson Learnt
A genuine claim that the accused was a minor at the time of the crime can be raised and must be examined at any point in the legal process, even years after a conviction is final, because juvenile justice protections are a fundamental right, not a technicality that expires with the passage of time.