Schoolkid’s murder in Delhi: Supreme Court to examine juvenility of accused

The top court also asked the Centre and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to issue guidelines regarding such matters.
Supreme Court (Photo | Shekhar Yadav, EPS)
Supreme Court (Photo | Shekhar Yadav, EPS)

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Wednesday said a juvenile accused of killing a seven-year-old child at a private school in Haryana’s Gurugram district in 2017 be examined afresh to ascertain whether he should be tried as an adult or not for the alleged crime.

A bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and Vikram Nath dismissed the appeals filed by the father of the deceased child challenging the October 11, 2018 order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court. The top court also asked the Centre and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to issue guidelines regarding such matters.

The high court had set aside a lower court order which said the 16-year-old student, accused of killing the child over a year ago, will be treated as an adult during the trial. The high court observed that the procedure adopted by the lower court to declare that the accused be tried as an adult cannot be sustained in the eyes of law and therefore, the order is being set aside with the observation that it shall be remanded back to the JJ Board for taking a fresh view on the same, advocate Sushil Tekriwal, representing the victim’s family, had said. The CBI, in a charge sheet, had alleged that the teenager had murdered the student on September 8, 2017, in a bid to get the examinations postponed and a scheduled parent-teacher meeting cancelled.

The victim’s body, with the throat slit, was found in the washroom of the school in the Bhondsi area in Gurgaon. Earlier, the court had barred the media from using the name of the 16-year-old juvenile accused in the case and asked it to use fictitious names instead.

HC asks PWD officials to plant over 800 trees
NEW DELHI: The Delhi HC on Wednesday granted an opportunity to three PWD officials to plant over 800 trees in the city to mitigate their ‘wrongdoing’ concerning a contempt case against them and kept in abeyance its order sending them to jail. Justice Najmi Waziri said that in view of the assurance given by the officials — who were held guilty of contempt of court earlier this year for violating judicial orders on the protection of trees, the two-month imprisonment awarded to two of them and four-month imprisonment to the other official shall not come into operation till the next date of hearing.

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