Pulling up three senior doctors from two government hospitals for a vague age report, the Delhi High Court said it was the “solemn duty” of the medical board “not to give a sketchy or evasive report but to give a categorical finding individually and on composite basis, with regard to estimation of age of the person under examination”. The court of Justice Kailash Gambhir and Justice Sunita Gupta issued orders to the AIIMS director to constitute a new medical board to conduct age examination of a man after the previous board in its report said he was “between 25-30 years of age due to his physical appearance”. The court noted that of the three doctors on the board, the dental specialist had opined that the accused was “between 18-25 years of age”. But the board had given a final finding that he was older than 25, because “the chairman of the board, who is a specialist in forensic medicine assessed his age as 30 years, based on his physical appearance”. “It must be appreciated that courts do not have any expertise in the medical field and, therefore, the report given by the duly constituted medical board of the government hospital is normally accepted. Members of the medical boards who are experts in the different streams cannot adopt a casual or cavalier approach in carrying out the assessment with regard to the determination of age of an offender,” the court said. “We are also not persuaded to accept that merely based on physical appearance, there could be a variation of five years in the age of a person,” the court said. The court has asked the AIIMS director to submit a fresh report within four weeks.
