Abdul Razzaq v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2015)

The most valuable single rule in this module is that a claim of juvenility is not lost by delay. A student who knows only that the Board deals with children under eighteen cannot answer the standard problem: a man has been convicted and has served years in prison, and it now appears that he was a child when the offence was committed. Was the conviction a nullity? Is it too late to say so?

Abdul Razzaq is the case in which that situation actually arose, and it shows what the answer is worth in practice.

The accused was convicted and sentenced in 1980. He was, at the time of the occurrence, a juvenile within the meaning of the juvenile justice legislation. The claim of juvenility was raised long after conviction.

The Court held that he was entitled to the benefit of the juvenile justice legislation, and he was finally released after fourteen years of imprisonment.

The reasoning rests on the character of the juvenility provision. It is not a defence to be pleaded at the trial and abandoned if it is not; it is a limit on the jurisdiction of the ordinary criminal court over the person. A court that sentenced a person who was in law a child has done something the statute did not permit it to do, and the passage of time does not supply the authority that was missing.

That is why the claim may be raised at any stage, and why it does not fail because the person is now an adult. The Act of 2015 puts the point beyond argument in the proviso to s. 9(2): a claim of juvenility may be raised before any court, it shall be recognised at any stage, even after final disposal of the case, and it shall be determined in accordance with the Act even if the person has ceased to be a child before the Act came into force. Where the court finds that the person was a child on the date of the offence, it forwards him to the Board, and the sentence passed by the court is deemed to have no effect.

Use it in any problem in which juvenility surfaces late — after conviction, on appeal, or years into a sentence — and in any question on which court decides a claim of juvenility.

It disposes of the argument that the claim is waived by not being taken at the trial, and of the argument that the benefit is unavailable to a person who is now an adult. It does not decide how age is proved; for that, take the evidence hierarchy in s. 94 of the Act of 2015 and the cases on it.

Note the change in the statute. The decision was given under s. 7A of the Act of 2000; the governing provision is now s. 9(2) of the Act of 2015, and the substance of the rule is carried forward.