Eighteen years after he committed the “heinous crime” of planting a kiss on a minor girl, the law has caught up with a “juvenile offender”, who is now a 34-year-old man. Finding him guilty of outraging the modesty of the girl, now a grown up woman, the Supreme Court (SC) has directed the offender to surrender and undergo six months in jail. The girl and the offender both were 16 years of age at the time of the crime. The two are now settled in life with their own families.
While handing out the unique judgement, the SC noted that in the prevailing scenario, the modesty of a woman has to be strongly guarded. The incident was of Malda in West Bengal where both the accused and the victim resided. In her complaint lodged 18 years ago, the girl had said that on November 6, 1995, while on her way to attend tuitions, the accused forcibly caught hold of her hair and planted a kiss on her lips. Her lower lip was injured and started bleeding.
However, it was only last year, on May 9, 2012, that the trial court sentenced him to six months in jail for the offence of outraging the modesty of the victim under IPC Section 354. later, the Calcutta High Court too decided against the accused and dismissed his appeal on September 19, 2012, against which he approached the SC.
The judgement holds significance as the SC refused to give the juvenile offender the benefit under law to escape a harsher punishment when it came to crimes committed against women. If the accused was to be tried before a Juvenile Justice Board, the maximum punishment he would have incurred was three years in a correctional home.
The bench of Justices BS Chauhan and SA Bobde said, “If any person uses criminal force upon any woman with the intention or knowledge that the woman’s modesty will be outraged, he is to be punished.” The judgement could serve as a precedent in the development of law relating to juveniles who are in conflict with law. The SC is already seized of a bunch of PIls where a demand has been made to prosecute juveniles accused of heinous offences in courts and to consider lowering the age bar for a juvenile from 18 to 16.
In this case, the court had no doubt that the accused was aged 16 years when he planted that kiss. But the Court was not willing to send the matter to Juvenile Board, as it went on the assumption that spending six months in jail would not prejudice the accused. Three years in a correctional home, it held, may not be practical now that the accused had a job and a family with children to look after.
The lawyer of the accused argued to let him off under the Probation of Offenders Act 1958 since he had no past criminal record and the offence was not of a grave nature. But the court held, “In the instant case, the appellant (accused) has committed a heinous crime.” It said, “With the social condition prevailing in the society, the modesty of a woman has to be strongly guarded and the appellant behaved like a road side Romeo, we do not think it is a fit case where the benefit of the 1958 Act should be given.”