Juvenile treated 'too leniently', no lessons learnt from Nirbhaya case: HC

The Madhya Pradesh High Court has observed that juveniles were being treated "rather too leniently" in the country, and that the legislature has "not learnt any lessons" from the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape case. In an order passed on September 11, Justice Subodh Abhyankar of the high court's Indore bench made these strongly-worded observations while dismissing an appeal filed by a man against the lower court's sentence in the case of four-year-old girl's rape in 2017. The convict was 17 years old at the time of the rape incident in 2017. He escaped from a juvenile correction home in 2019 along with seven other boys, six months after being sentenced. Expressing displeasure over this development, the high court said, "As a parting note, this Court is once again at pains to observe that juveniles in this country are being treated rather too leniently, and that the Legislature, to the utter misfortune of the victims of such crimes, has still not learnt any lessons from the horrors of ...