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From first to last, Om Prakash insisted that he was a juvenile by the date of the crime.
As a juvenile delinquent, according to the then law, he could not be tried in any regular court and could only be tried before the juvenile court. He could not even be sentenced to death or imprisonment.
Although Om Prakash insisted before the trial court that he was 14 years old at the time of the incident, his statement was rejected for a strange reason – that there was a bank account and a check book in his name. This, the court argued, was enough to show that he was not a minor as it was clearly impossible for minors to open a bank account.
Not only the trial court, but also the High Court and the Supreme Court accepted the existence of the bank account as “proof” of his attaining majority. Nowhere did the courts point to any law stating that minors cannot have bank accounts.
The strangeness does not end here.
The state of Uttarakhand had produced a school certificate from Om Prakash’s school in Jalpaiguri to show that he was indeed a minor as on the date of the offence. Yet the curative petition was also rejected without listening to Om Prakash.
While his death sentence was commuted by President Pratibha Patil, evidence of his juvenility was not taken into account by any authority until the Supreme Court did so in 2025.
But why? Why did one court after another refuse to look into Om Prakash’s claims of being a juvenile?
Read without context, Om Prakash is being punished for triple murder. Read in context, Om Prakash is being punished for the murder of his “master”. I have put this word in scare quotes, but the word is used three times in a 2002 Supreme Court decision to describe Om Prakash’s employer. The court does not really go into the motive or what might have motivated Om Prakash to take this drastic step.
In fact, it has no interest in doing so, even though the law requires the court to examine the intentions of the convict while awarding death sentence. The Supreme Court, like the rest of the judicial machinery, is not interested in justice according to the law, but in retribution using the processes of law.
It was only in 2025 that the Supreme Court finally acknowledged that a serious injustice had been committed by the judicial system in this case.
Even though it directs Om Prakash’s release, the court does not give him any compensation for the time he spent illegally in jail or honestly investigate why the entire judicial machinery conspired to keep him there.
(Alok Prasanna Kumar is a Senior Resident Fellow at Vidhi Center for Legal Policy, Bengaluru. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms. This is an opinion, and the views expressed are those of the author. The Quint Neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
