How Juvenile Justice Boards Should Conduct Preliminary Assessment Under S.15? Supreme Court Issues Guidelines

The Supreme Court has issued guidelines as to what factors should be considered by the Juvenile Justice Board while conducting preliminary assessment under Section 15 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. A bench of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan issued these guidelines while dismissing an appeal challenging the Patna High Court's ruling which upheld the Appellate Court's order that set aside the Juvenile Justice Board finding that the appellant be tried as an adult. The case arose from an alleged murder of a boy in Bihar in May 2022. The appellant, who was 16 years and four months old at the time of the incident, was accused of slitting the victim's throat with a knife. The appellant was apprehended while he was attempting to flee. While the Juvenile Justice Board held that he lacked mental and physical capacity to commit the offence and decided to try him as a juvenile, the Sessions Court set aside the order and directed that the juvenile be tried as an adult on an appeal filed by the complainant. The Patna High Court affirmed that ruling. Section 15 of the JJ Act deals with the Juvenile Justice Board's mandate to conduct a preliminary assessment when a heinous offence (attracting minimum punishment of seven years) is alleged to have been committed by a juvenile who is above the age of sixteen years. The preliminary assessment ascertains whether to try the juvenile as an adult by assessing his mental and physical capacity to commit the alleged offence, ability to understand its consequences, and the circumstances in which it is allegedly committed. Parameters to be considered:The Court held that the Juvenile Justice Board must apply its mind to all the materials available before it independently. It stated that the four parameters laid down under Section 15 of the JJ Act are distinct and must be considered independently and collectively. In order to prevent the preliminary assessment from becoming a mini-trial, the bench emphasised that the right to fair trial and the principle of presumption of innocence under the JJ Act must be balanced and no inference should be made regarding the guilt or the innocence of the accused while conducting the assessment. The factors to be considered while determining physical and mental capacity were discussed in detail by the Court. Referring to the “mental capacity” of a child as his ability to make social decisions and judgments, the bench extended it to include “a range of cognitive abilities, developmental disability, comprehension, decision-making and reasoning, more particularly, the child's understanding of conflict and his understanding of the consequences of his actions.”The ambit of “physical capacity” has also been widened. “Physical capacity would not be restricted to locomotor abilities of the child. It would be assessed having regard to the nature of the act involved in the alleged offence. The assessment would constitute examination of whether the child, given his age, and physical development was physically capable of committing the offence in the manner alleged,” the bench observed. The Court relied heavily on its earlier decision in Barun Chandra Thakur v Bholu to explain that “consequences” under Section 15 must be read expansively, covering psychological and long-term effects on the victim, the child, and both families, and not just the immediate physical harm. It noted that a child's intellectual awareness of risk does not necessarily translate into an ability to control impulsive behaviour, considering the role peer influence and emotional impulse play at that age. Expert opinion cannot be the sole criteria:In the present case, the Juvenile Justice Board had based its conclusion solely on expert opinion obtained under Section 15(1) of the JJ Act. Issuing the guidelines, the bench called such a finding an error. “The majority opinion of the JJ Board makes no mention whatsoever of the SIR or the SBR. It erred in failing to consider the SIR and the SBR, more particularly, the antecedents and recommendations made by the Probation Officer and the CWPO, respectively. underscore or rather emphasize that the SIR and the SBR reports are not supplementary material, they constitute pertinent inputs for the preliminary assessment and must be accorded due weight alongside the expert opinion.”, it was observed.Barun Chandra Thakur v Bholu dealt with the significance of an expert's assistance while conducting preliminary assessment and the circumstances under which their assistance would be rendered necessary. The bench, however, held that expert opinion could not be the sole consideration in the Board's decision. The bench referred to Gujarat High Court's ruling in Child in Conflict with Law v State of Gujarat which listed eleven additional factors to be considered other than the Social Investigation Report and the Social Background Report. It includes antecedents of the child, his school records and education amongst...

How Juvenile Justice Boards Should Conduct Preliminary Assessment Under S.15? Supreme Court Issues Guidelines

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How Juvenile Justice Boards Should Conduct Preliminary Assessment Under S.15? Supreme Court Issues Guidelines

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