Porsche case accused to be tried as minor; Juvenile Justice Board rejects police plea

Pune, Jul 15 (PTI) The Juvenile Justice Board on Tuesday rejected the Pune city police’s application seeking that the 17-year-old boy accused in the Porsche car crash be tried as an adult for the trial in the case.

The boy is accused of driving the luxury car in Kalyani Nagar area of Pune in an inebriated state and mowing down motorcycle-borne IT professionals Anish Awadhiya and Ashwini Costa in May last year.

Citing sections of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, the Pune city police filed an application before the Board, seeking that the child in conflict with law (CCL) be tried as an adult in this case.

The police said he committed a heinous act, as not only were two persons crushed to death but there were also attempts to tamper with the evidence.

On Tuesday, the Board rejected the plea by police to treat the boy as an adult for the trial, as per defence counsel Prashant Patil.

Patil told PTI that he opposed the prosecution's demand to treat the teenager as an adult, by citing some case laws.

"We had cited a Supreme Court Judgement - Shilpa Mittal Vs State in which the SC has defined what constitutes a heinous crime. The guidelines decided by the Supreme Court are binding on everyone. However, the plea by the prosecution is contrary to the apex court's judgement. We demanded that since the plea is contrary to the SC guidelines, it is not maintainable," Patil said.

To define a certain crime as heinous, the prosecution must have a section (invoked in the case) in which minimum punishment is seven years, he said.

"In the present case, there is not a single section which has a minimum punishment of seven years. So, we argued that the prosecution’s plea is not maintainable," he said.

The Board’s preliminary assessment did not determine that the boy should be treated as an adult," said Patil.

The teenager got bail hours after the accident. The lenient bail terms, including asking him to write a 300-word essay on road safety, triggered a nationwide firestorm, following which he was sent to an observation home in Pune.

On June 25 last year, the Bombay High Court directed that the boy be released immediately, saying the Board's orders remanding him to an observation home were illegal and the law regarding juveniles must be implemented fully.

Arguments have been underway for framing charges against 10 other accused, including the teenager's parents, before a sessions court in Pune.

While the boy’s mother is out on bail, the remaining nine are in jail.

The prosecution earlier this month told the court that attempts were made to swap blood samples at a second hospital to save the juvenile accused, but it wasn’t successful.

The prosecution said the Pune police, who first got blood samples of the minor collected at the Sassoon Hospital, suspected that there was a possibility of tampering.

The police then got the teenager’s blood samples collected at the Aundh Government Hospital as a pre-emptive measure, but some of the other accused, including his parents, got a whiff of it, the police had said.

The accused persons approached the Aundh hospital authorities to swap the samples, but the doctors there refused to cooperate and turned them away, the prosecution claimed. PTI SPK GK VT