Niranaram Chetanram Chaudhary is a 41-year-old, well-read, socially-conscious man who stepped out of jail on March 27, 2023, after 28 years of incarceration. He was only 12.5 years old when he was arrested in a high-profile murder case in 1994. A native of Rajasthan, Niranaram had dropped out of school in class 3 and moved to Pune as a migrant worker when he was around nine years old. It was here that he was arrested, convicted, and awarded the death penalty by a sessions court in a case that came to be known as the Rathi murder case. However, he was tried not as a juvenile, but as an adult, throughout the trial period.
His release from jail came at the end of a nine-year-long effort led by Project 39A, a criminal justice initiative at National Law University, Delhi, with the Supreme Court (SC) declaring that he was in fact a juvenile at the time the offence was committed.
He was released under section 9(2) of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 (JJ Act 2015), which says that if a person is found to be a juvenile at the time of offence, it may be raised before any court at any stage of the case, even after its final disposal.
“How can the entire system fail to see that he was a juvenile in conflict with the law? From the trial, which ended in 1998, till 2018, his claim of juvenility was not appropriately raised before any court. This implies that the system failed not just him, but several others who have no resources to do this,” said advocate Shreya Rastogi, founding member and director, Death Penalty Litigation and Forensics at Project 39A.
Niranaram (misspelt as Narayan by the police) was arrested along with two others – Jitu Nayansingh Gehlot and Rajusingh Rajpurohit – in the 1994 Rathi murder case in Pune, Maharashtra. The three were convicted for murdering five persons, including a pregnant woman and two children, in a robbery attempt.
Niranaram, Jitu, and Rajusingh were booked under sections 302 (murder), 342 (wrongful confinement), 397 (robbery with attempt to cause death or grievous hurt), 449 (house-trespass in order to commit offence punishable with death) read with 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
While Rajusingh was released after he turned approver (giving full disclosure about a crime in return for pardon), Niranaram and Jitu were convicted and awarded death sentences by the Pune Additional Sessions Court in 1998. In 1999, the duo appealed to the Bombay High Court, which confirmed the conviction and sentence. They then appealed to the SC, which also dismissed the appeal in 2000.
Niranaram’s chargesheet stated that he was 20 years old at the time of the offence. “He did not raise the plea of juvenility during the trial or appeals, because he did not know that he could do that. “We have to keep in mind that changes were made to the JJ Act four times when he was in jail, but he was not informed of the same,” Shreya pointed out.
“It was in 2005 that he came to know about such a provision through media reports and asked the prison authorities for a medical examination. His age was verified through a bone ossification test, which showed a very wide margin – 22 to 40 years at the time of the examination – making him between 11 to 29 years old at the time of the incident,” Shreya elaborated.
In 2006, for the first time, a mercy petition was submitted to the President of India by human rights groups requesting to cancel the death penalty on the ground that he was a juvenile at the time of commission of the offence. “After the mercy petition was filed, he was again taken back to a hospital where he informed the medical superintendent about his juvenility and that there are school documents that can be found in Rajasthan that would corroborate this. However, the trail went cold here and the state did not follow it up,” said Shreya.
In 2013, Niranaram’s family filed a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution (rights to constitutional remedies) seeking quashing of the punishment as he was a juvenile when the offence was committed. However, this was dismissed by a two-judge SC bench, who said that the petition cannot be entertained under Article 32.
“This was not the best way to have filed the case. It should have been filed under section 7A of the JJ Act, 2000. While the court said it did not want to entertain the petition, they did not give any opinion on the juvenility issue,” Shreya said.
According to section 7A of JJ Act, 2000, when a claim of juvenility is raised before any court, or if a court is of the opinion that an accused person was a juvenile during the offence, it should make an inquiry, consider evidence to determine the age of the person, and find if they were a juvenile or not.
When Project 39A learned about his case in 2014, Niranaram’s earlier review petition filed in 2013 was reopened. “This was done pursuant to the SC decision in Mohammed Arif vs Registrar, Supreme Court, passed in September 2014 — that death sentence matters should be heard by an SC bench of at least three judges. In 2019, the court said that this will be retrospectively applicable to cases in which review petitions were rejected before 2014,” Shreya explained.
She adds that an application under section 9(2) of the JJ Act, 2015, was filed in 2015, along with several documents that included a copy of the original school register that Project 39A acquired from the Rajasthan school where Niranaram studied till class 3.
“The JJ Act, 2015, reconfirms 7A of JJ Act, 2000, and gives details of what documents should be looked at. When deciding on juvenility, the first emphasis should be placed on school records. Niranaram’s case documents show that the issue of juvenility had never been looked into by a court. The SC, after our petition, ordered a juvenility inquiry to be held by the sessions court. The report of the inquiry, which was sent to the SC, stated that he was 12 years and 6 months old at the time of the offence,” Shreya said. Based on the findings of the report, the SC ordered the release of Niranaram.
The documents taken into consideration for the sessions court report included a transfer certificate stating that he was born in 1982; a certificate of date of birth issued by the school’s headmaster; a copy of the school register issued by the headmaster; a certificate of bonafide resident; caste certificate; certificate by the Sarpanch certifying that Narayan Chaudhary is the same person whose is known by the alias Niranaram; his family card (Pariwar Card); and the 2005 age verification report.
“Niranaram was someone who was in prison for very long — 28.5 years. He spent 25 of these as a death row convict. He basically grew up inside prison and did his entire education there. He acquired a bachelor's degree in social sciences and masters in sociology, along with multiple certificate courses. He is an avid reader, speaks English well, reads four newspapers daily, and is up to date on current affairs,” Shreya said, adding that it was based on the knowledge he acquired that he raised the issue of juvenility in 2005.
She pointed out that until then, it had occurred to no one in the system, including lawyers, courts, or investigators, that he was a juvenile at the time of the offence. “Niranaram came to know about the changes in the law through media reports and took initiative. The system should have done this. Legal awareness camps should have been conducted and everyone concerned should have been informed of the legal provisions they could avail. It is the responsibility of the system to make sure that justice is served. Niranaram couldn’t have done anything — he was a 12-year-old being tried in a high-profile case, far from his hometown, in a different state,” she said.
Niranaram and others like him are left to their own resources when it comes to fighting for their rights. “Nobody tells prisoners when the law changes, and the system has no way of reaching out to people who can benefit from this. Justice is left to fate. There are a confluence of factors in Niranaram’s case that helped secure justice. But we cannot say everyone has the means to do these things. We don’t have a system that is foolproof to ensure that only the right thing will be done. There are several more prisoners who neither know what the law is nor have the resources to do secure justice. I am haunted by the thought of what will happen to them,” Shreya said.