Pawan Kumar vs The State of Uttar Pradesh & Ors.
Background
The appellant was convicted along with his father and brother for the murder of, and grievous injury to, members of a neighbouring family following a dispute over irrigation water in 1995, and was sentenced to life imprisonment; the Allahabad High Court upheld the conviction in 2019. Throughout the trial and appeal, the appellant claimed he was a juvenile (under 16, the cutoff at the time) on the date of the offence, but the courts below relied on conflicting evidence, a Family Register showing an older age and a bone ossification test estimating him at 19, to reject the claim. The Supreme Court remanded the juvenility question twice to the trial court for fresh inquiry, and a final 2022 report, based on consistent date-of-birth entries across all three schools the appellant attended, supported his claim of being about 15 years old at the time of the offence.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that under the applicable Juvenile Justice Rules, school records are given more evidentiary weight than the Panchayat Family Register, and that a bone ossification test is not an exact science. It leaves a margin of about two years and cannot override consistent documentary evidence. Applying the settled principle that courts should lean towards finding juvenility whenever two views are reasonably possible on the same evidence, and further applying Rule 12(3)(b)'s allowance of a one-year benefit of the doubt even if the medical report were accepted, the Court accepted the appellant was a juvenile on the date of the offence. It upheld the finding of guilt (since the evidence of the assault was common to the appellant and his co-accused), but quashed the life sentence as legally impermissible for a juvenile, and ordered his immediate release since he had already served more than the three-year maximum detention period allowed under the Juvenile Justice Act for juveniles.
Lesson Learnt
A claim of juvenility can be raised and examined at any stage of proceedings, even years after conviction, and school records generally carry more weight than family/panchayat registers or approximate medical age tests; when the evidence is genuinely borderline, courts are directed to resolve the doubt in favour of the accused being treated as a juvenile.