Pune: The Juvenile Justice Board Tuesday rejected the Pune police’s plea seeking that a 17-year-old boy accused of driving a Porsche car in an inebriated state and mowing down two persons last year be treated as an adult for the trial in the case.
The incident, which hit national headlines, took place in the Kalyani Nagar area her May 19 last year, resulting in the deaths of motorcycle-borne IT professionals Anish Awadhiya and his friend Ashwini Costa.
The Pune police last year sought that the accused be tried as an adult, saying he committed a “heinous” act, as not only were two persons crushed to death, but there were also attempts to tamper with the evidence.
On Tuesday, the Juvenile Justice Board rejected the police’s plea to treat the accused boy as an adult for the trial, as per defence counsel Prashant Patil.
Speaking to PTI, Patil said he had opposed the prosecution’s demand to treat the teenager as an adult, citing some case laws.
“We had cited a Supreme Court Judgement – Shilpa Mittal Vs State, in which the SC has defined what is a heinous crime. The guidelines decided by the Supreme Court are binding on everyone; however, the plea by the prosecution is contrary to the apex court’s judgement. We demanded that since the plea is contrary to the SC’s guidelines, it is not maintainable,” he said.
To define a certain crime as heinous, the prosecution must have a section (invoked in the case) in which the minimum punishment is seven years, the counsel said.
“In the present case, not a single section is there which has a minimum punishment of seven years. So, we had argued that how is this plea maintainable,” he added.
Patil said he contended it was the responsibility of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) to determine the ‘child in conflict with law’ (CCL) as an adult or a minor.
“The JJB should carry out the preliminary assessment to determine whether the CCL should be treated as an adult or minor and in this case, the JJB had already done that and it has not come in their preliminary assessment that he should be treated as an adult,” said Patil.
The teenager got bail hours after the accident May 19 last year.
The lenient bail terms, including asking him to write a 300-word essay on road safety, triggered a nationwide firestorm, following which he was sent to an observation home in Pune city three days later.
On June 25, 2024, the Bombay High Court directed that the boy be released immediately, saying the Juvenile Justice Board’s orders remanding him to an observation home were illegal and the law regarding juveniles must be implemented fully.
Arguments have been underway for framing charges against 10 other accused in the case before a sessions court in Pune.
The accused include the teenager’s father and mother.
Sassoon Hospital doctors Ajay Taware and Shrihari Halnor, and staffers Atul Ghatkamble, middlemen Bashpak Makandar and Amar Gaikwad, as well as Aditya Avinash Sood, Ashish Mittal, and Arun Kumar Singh, are also among the accused.
While the juvenile’s mother is out on bail, the remaining nine are in jail.
The prosecution, earlier this month, told the court that attempts were made to swap blood samples at a second hospital to save the juvenile accused, but it wasn’t successful.
Submitting additional documents under Section 173(8) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the prosecution said that the Pune police, which first got blood samples of the minor collected at the Sassoon Hospital, suspected that there was a possibility of tampering.
The police then got the teenager’s blood samples collected at the Aundh Government Hospital as a pre-emptive measure, but some of the other accused, including his parents, got a whiff of it, the police had said.
The accused persons approached the Aundh hospital authorities to swap the samples, but the doctors there refused to cooperate and turned them away, the prosecution claimed.
PTI
