NEW DELHI: Twenty-one years after being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a homicide case, the Supreme Court has put aside the conviction of a Chhattisgarh girl on the bottom that she was a minor on the time of the crime. She had already spent eight years in jail throughout this era.
Pramila, a resident of Balrampur district, was charged in a 2000 homicide case and convicted by the trial courtroom in 2003. She had appealed in opposition to the conviction within the excessive courtroom which had in 2010 rejected her plea after which she moved the apex courtroom. She didn’t elevate the plea of juvenility within the trial courtroom or excessive courtroom and it was first raised in SC in 2023 by her lawyer.
SC on Sept 13 final yr directed the periods courtroom to carry an inquiry into the problem of juvenility. Additional periods decide of Balrampur district submitted findings which recorded that her date of delivery is Sept 1, 1982. Therefore, on the date of the crime on June 15, 2000, her age was 17 years, 9 months and 14 days. Accepting the findings, a bench of Justices Abhay S Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan granted her reduction and acquitted her.
“The case will be governed by the Juvenile Justice Act, 1986. Under clause (h) of Section 2 of Act, a ‘juvenile’ has been defined to mean a boy who has not attained the age of sixteen years or a girl who has not attained the age of eighteen years. Thus, on the date of occurrence of the offence, the appellant was a juvenile. Therefore, the appellant ought to have been dealt with in accordance with Section 21 of the 1986 JJ Act. The maximum action which could have been taken against the appellant was of sending her to a special home. In the case of a girl of sixteen years of age, she could have been sent to a special home for a period of not less than three years. As per Section 22(1) of the 1986 JJ Act, there was a prohibition on sentencing a juvenile to undergo imprisonment,” the bench mentioned.