Supreme Court releases death row convict after 28 years as school records confirmed his juvenility at the time of offence

On March 27, 2023, the Supreme Court of India released a convict, who was on death row, upon finding that he was a juvenile at the time of the commission of the offence. The convict was in detention for over 28 years, after being arrested for committing the heinous crime of murder in a shocking manner which resulted in the death of 5 innocent women (including one pregnant woman) and 2 children. The decision to release the convict (Niranaram Chaudhary) was taken on the basis of a date from the school admission register in Rajasthan’s Bikaner. The register showed that the convict had dropped out of the 3rd class on 15 May 1989. Taking this into consideration, the Supreme Court bench, Justices Aniruddha Bose, Hrishikesh Roy, and KM Joseph, ruled that while being sentenced to death in 1998, he was a juvenile. The bench highlighted that as per the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, a more than three years sentence punishment and the death penalty cannot be subjected to a juvenile convict. The bench further delivered their verdict and said “Chaudhary be set free forthwith from the correlational home in which he remains imprisoned, as he has suffered imprisonment for more than 28 years.”

In the Narayan Chetanram Chaudhary vs the State of Maharashtra case, an application under Section 9(2) of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 was filed representing that the applicant was a juvenile on the date of commission of the offence. The death sentence was given by the Additional Sessions Judge, Pune as he committed the murder of 5 women and two children in Pune and was sent to Yerawada jail of Pune. In 2000, the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court itself confirmed the death sentence of Chaudhary. In 2018, Chaudhary again moved the Supreme Court with the intervention of Project 39A and argued that his name was wrongly recorded by the Pune court as ‘Narayan’ and his actual name was Niranaram. The case was referred to the Principal District and Sessions Judge in Pune by the top Court in 2019, for deciding the juvenile status of Chaudhary at the time of the commission of the offence. 

The issue presented before the top Court was regarding the discrepancies in the name and age of the convict. The Supreme Court bench delivered the final verdict, “Apart from the documents of the school, there is a family card, to which we have referred earlier. The date of issue of Family Card is 1989 and, in this card, issued by the State Government, Nirvana’s age is shown to be 12 years.” The bench further added, “Going by that certificate, his age at the time of commission of offence was 12 years and 6 months. Thus, he was a child/ juvenile on the date of commission of offence for which he has been convicted, in terms of the provisions of the 2015 Act. this shall be deemed to be the true age of Niranaram, who was tried and convicted as Narayan.”

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