Gurugram: Twenty-five years after being sentenced to 15 years in jail for abducting and raping a woman in Haryana, convict Shiv Kumar has had his sentence reduced to the time already served—because a school-leaving certificate convinced the Punjab and Haryana High Court that he was a juvenile at the time of the offence.
Justice Subhas Mehla, ruling on 1 July, allowed Kumar’s appeal on the issue of juvenility, holding that he was 16 years, 6 months and 17 days old on 19 June, 1999, the date of the offence, and therefore entitled to be treated as a juvenile under law, even though no such plea was raised at his original trial in 2001.
Kumar was convicted by a trial court in May 2001 under Sections 363 (kidnapping), 366-A (procuring a minor for illicit intercourse) and 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code, and sentenced to a cumulative 15 years of rigorous imprisonment. His co-accused died before the case could be decided.
Kumar’s counsel, advocate Harparteek Singh Sandhu, appointed as amicus curiae, did not contest the conviction itself. Instead, he argued that Kumar was a juvenile at the time of the offence under the law as it existed later—even though the Juvenile Justice Act, 1986, in force in 1999, set the cut-off age for boys at 16, a threshold Kumar had technically crossed.
The subsequent Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000, raised that age to 18, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, most notably in Dharambir vs State (NCT of Delhi) and Hansraj vs State of UP, that this higher threshold applies retrospectively, even to those convicted years before the 2000 Act came into force.
Acting on Kumar’s plea, the high court in September 2025 had directed the District and Sessions Judge, Yamuna Nagar, to inquire into his actual age. That inquiry, submitted in December 2025, rested on the details provided by Kalpana Gupta, principal of S.D. Modern School in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur, who produced the school’s original admission and withdrawal register. The record showed Kumar had enrolled in Class 5 in 1992 and studied there until 1993, with his date of birth entered as 2 January, 1983. That made him a minor by nearly two years on the day of the offence, according to the current law.
The state did not contest the finding. With juvenility established and unrebutted, the high court held that while Kumar’s conviction would stand, his 2001 sentence, which included 8 years for rape alone, could not survive, since the Juvenile Justice Act caps punishment at three years for a juvenile convict.
Given that Kumar had already spent 2 years, 8 months and 16 days in custody, the court ruled that no purpose would be served by sending the matter to the Juvenile Justice Board for appropriate orders, and ordered his sentence reduced to the time served.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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