Subramanian Swamy v. Raju (2014)

Module IV opens with a question that every essay on juvenile justice has to answer first: why is there a separate system at all, when the child is alleged to have done exactly what an adult would be tried for? Until that is answered, the Board, the inquiry, the bar on joint trial and the ceiling of three years in a special home all look like leniency rather than design.

Subramanian Swamy gives the answer in one sentence, and it is the sentence to build an introduction on.

The decision concerned the position of a child in conflict with law under the juvenile justice legislation, and the relationship between that legislation and trial under the general criminal law. The course carries it for the proposition below.

The Court held that the aim of the juvenile justice system is to reform and rehabilitate the errant juvenile, whereas a criminal trial aims at finding guilt or innocence with the object of punishing the guilty. The juvenile justice system and the criminal justice system are therefore different.

The reasoning proceeds by comparing objects rather than procedures, and that is what makes it portable. Two systems that pursue different ends will differ at every stage, and the differences are consequences rather than concessions: an inquiry rather than a trial, because the question is not confined to guilt; a Board with a social-work composition rather than a judge alone, because the disposal turns on the child's circumstances; a disposal directed at supervision, counselling and placement rather than at punishment; and a bar on trying the child together with an adult, because the two proceedings are asking different questions.

The corollary is the one to state in an answer: a procedural rule borrowed from the ordinary criminal law cannot be applied to a Board proceeding without first asking whether it serves the reformative object.

This is the opening authority for any essay on the object and philosophy of the JJ Act, on the general principles in s. 3, or on why the Board is not a criminal court. It is also the case to cite against the argument that a child charged with a grave offence should simply be tried as an adult.

Say expressly how far it now goes. The decision was given under the Act of 2000, which contained no mechanism for trying any child as an adult. The Act of 2015 introduced one: for a heinous offence alleged against a child who has completed sixteen years, the Board makes a preliminary assessment under s. 15, and the Children's Court may then decide under s. 19 whether there is a need for trial as an adult. The proposition that the two systems have different objects survives, and it is the strongest material for the argument that s. 15 sits awkwardly with the Act's own design — but it no longer describes the whole of the law.

It does not decide anything about age determination, about the composition of the Board, or about any particular disposal.