If Supreme Court Judges P.N. Bhagawati, Ranghanath Mishra and N. Venkatachaliah had not refused to hear my petition in 1986-88 on behalf of 24 children suffering life sentences in the jails of Bihar, Punjab and Orissa, the Juvenile Court, Bhubhaneshwar, would not have felt free to condemn Chenchu Hansda, age 13-14, to 14 years in detention. As it happens the juvenile court has given a life sentence to a pubertal tribal boy in violation of the Constitution, the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) and the Juvenile Justice Act (JJA). One would have sympathised with the judicial magistrates in their confused reading of the law, as the juvenile justice system itself is a medley of ideas in search of a lucid law. But the magistrates' assessment of the evidence is so biased and their violation of the Constitution so blatant that every reading of their judgement incites a rush of anger. Aiding them is CBI's foggy depiction of the crime through `eye witness' accounts and its strategic collage of the prosecution case fissured with patches of absent (blacked out?) information. I have not read the FIR and the depositions but, according to the summary of evidence in the judgement, on January 21, 1999, by sundown Chenchu, aged about 12 years, and a few other tribal boys were among the ``30-40'' persons who arrived in Manoharpur with Dara Singh. Chenchu and another person, Ojen Hansda, bought food for the group from a local shop. That night, Staines finished his lecture. The family went to sleep in one of their two jeeps parked outside the church. Around midnight, Dara's group attacked them. Sixty feet from the vehicles, villagers were watching a nagin dance in celebration of Saraswati pooja. None of them seem to have noticed the attackers arrive and set the jeeps on fire. In the midst of the dance, Staines' followers, sleeping in their houses a 100 feet from the jeeps, woke up to the sounds of a lathi attack on the vehicles. Witnesses Besi and Soloman saw ``two persons'' take straw from a farm and push it under the vehicles and set on fire first the empty jeep and then the vehicle in which the Staines were sleeping. When four other witnesses saw the event, the jeeps were aflame. One of these deponents was warned by ``2-3 persons with faces covered in mufflers''. None of the witnesses have identified the adult arsonists but all them place Chenchu at the crime scene. Chenchu's own story is missing from the case. Section 19 of JJA mandates that the juvenile, his parents and a probation office be heard and their presentation be taken into consideration by the Court. Indeed, the gravest failures of the bench comprising Sukumar Sahu, addl chief judicial magistrate-cum-presiding magistrate and Gajendra Mahapatra, sub-divisional judicial magistrate, are misappropriation of legal powers and misapplication of case law. In any case, no magistrate has the authority to give life sentences. S 29 of CrPC is explicit on the point. The JJA S 21, which the Bench quotes, limits the authority of Juvenile Court to order commitment to custody a delinquent only till age 18-19. The magistrates assert that they draw their life sentencing authority from Section 22 of JJA, a provision which in fact restricts their decision making powers. The section cannot be used in cases of children who have yet to complete age of 14. And Chenchu, according to magistrates themselves was about 12 years old when brought before the Juvenile Court around June '99. Even if Chenchu was in his 15th year when the Staines were killed, the magistrates do not have power either under CrPC or JJA to order hisdetention for 14 years. To my utmost disgust, Saha and Mahapatra have condemned the child invoking my name! They refer to my case against 30 States and Union Territories and the Central Government to release children from 1114 jails and sub jails of India, and pleading for a sane and child-supportive juvenile justice system in which detention would be the last option! I have petitioned Home minister L.K. Advani and Law and Justice minister Arun Jaitley to approach the High Court urgently to correct the grave injustice and have offered all my help in this endeavour.The writer is a well-known child rights activist
