The Supreme Court has acquitted a man sentenced to life imprisonment in a 20-year-old murder case on learning that he was a juvenile at the time of commission of the crime in 1998.
The case concerns the murder of Inderjeet Bhuman by Ashok Mehta and his son in Punjab. The sessions court in June 2000 acquitted the duo. The State then appealed to the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which in 2008 upheld the appeal and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
This time, the Mehras approached the Supreme Court. The appeal was pending in the Court for 11 years before it was finally decided by a Bench of Justices A.M. Sapre and Dinesh Maheshwari on April 15. The father died during the pendency of the appeal, and the case against him has abated.
The Bench found that the son had not completed 18 years when the offence was committed and was entitled to the benefit of the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act. It reiterated the law that “a claim of juvenility can be raised at any stage by an accused before any court, including the Supreme Court, even after the final disposal of a case.”
The juvenility claim in this case was neither agitated in the trial nor before the High Court. Justice Sapre said it was irrelevant whether the juvenility claim was made in trial court or not.
The prosecution had never challenged the correctness of the accused man’s birth certificate. He was, in fact, even granted bail on the ground of juvenility in July 2011.
“Till date he has already undergone considerable jail sentence, partly as an undertrial and partly as a convict... His appeal has to be allowed without going into the merits of the case,” the court held.
