Juvenile: – (young people who are not yet adults)
Every day thousands of children around the world get caught up in the adult formal justice system. Children are arrested and detained by police, tried by magistrates, and sent to institutions, including prisons, under systems of justice. Although there are explicit international guidelines on the proper administration of juvenile justice, and on community-based conflict resolution and rehabilitation of child offenders, children’s rights, and special needs are being ignored.
Some children have left their homes and taken to the streets to escape from violence and abuse at the hands of their families. These children, who are abandoned and destitute, are also at high risk of sexual exploitation, trafficking and becoming involved in substance abuse and the drug trade through peer influence or the influence of adults.
Juvenile Law: A juvenile is a child who has not completed the age of Juvenile Justice 16 years in the case of boys, or the age of 18 years Act, 1960 in the case of girls. A delinquent juvenile cannot be sentenced to imprisonment.
The police can arrest children if they believe they have committed a crime. Typically, police stations will have a child welfare protection officer (Section 107 of JJ Act 2015) and in each district and city, there will be at least one particular juvenile police unit
Justice is abstract, law is a fact
Juvenile court
Each state has special courts—usually called juvenile courts—devoted to handling cases where minors are accused of violating a criminal statute. But, instead of being formally charged with the crime, juvenile offenders are accused of committing a delinquent act.
A juvenile case gets typically started when a prosecutor or probation officer files a petition charging the juvenile with violating a criminal statute and asking that the court determine that the juvenile is delinquent. If proven, the court enters a delinquency adjudication (similar to an adult conviction) and may order a disposition (sentence) to rehabilitate the juvenile.
Often, the juvenile court retains legal authority over the minor for a set period of time—until the juvenile becomes an adult, or sometimes even longer.
What is meant by Juvenile Justice?
juvenile justice is the system of laws, policies, and procedures intended to regulate the processing and treatment of nonadult offenders for violations of law and to provide legal remedies that protect their interests in situations of conflict or neglect.
We all know what happened in the Nirbhaya case, the juvenile convict is a cook now and has a new name in south India. The juvenile justice act, declared Afroz @ Raju to be 17th years and 6 months old and rejected the police request for a bone-ossification test for positive documentation of his age. Since established as the ‘most brutal” of the six accused, the minor was tried separately in a juvenile court. On 31st Aug, he was convicted of rape and murder under (JJA)
and given the maximum sentence of 3 years imprisonment in a reform facility, inclusive of the eight months he had spent remaining during the trial. The juvenile was released on the 20th Dec 2015. Here justice has been done which is followed by law, no one is above than law. Justice is ideal, it is followed up, no matter whether he is poor, rich, criminal or innocent, justice will come up in his form to be an exact weighing of his crime, including punishment.
Law is not equal to justice, justice is an ideal, law is a tool to get there.
[1] References – the dramatic decade by Indu Bhan
Mukesh & Anr vs State for NCT of Delhi & Ors on 5 May 2017 (Nirbhaya case)
Jiyak 