Pune Porsche crash: Why Juvenile Justice Board rejected plea to try accused as adult

The May 2024 crash resulted in the death of two IT professionals.

The prime accused in the Pune Porsche crash case, a minor who rammed his father's car into a bike leading to the death of two people, is not being tried as an adult because the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) ruled that the offence doesn't qualify as a 'heinous crime'.

Son of a prominent Pune-based real estate developer, the 17-year-old boy is accused of driving a luxury car in Pune's Kalyani Nagar area in an inebriated state and fatally knocking down the motorcycle-borne IT professionals in May 2024. He was booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code including Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and also faces charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act and sections of the Motor Vehicles Act. However the charges he faces do not attract minimum jail terms of 7 years or more.

Hence, the Board - which granted the teen bail hours after the crash - concluded that none of the charges fulfil the criteria to declare his crimes a "heinous" offence under the Juvenile Justice Act. "The preliminary assessment under Section 15 - for declaring the child to be tried as an adult - is not maintainable," it said.

The Juvenile Justice Board was earlier criticised for the lenient bail terms, including asking him to write a 300-word essay on road safety. It triggered a nationwide firestorm, following which the teen was sent to an observation home in Pune.

While arguing that the boy had committed a heinous act, the Pune police said that not only were two people crushed to death but there were also attempts to tamper with the evidence. The Juvenile Justice Board, however, rejected the plea of the police to treat the boy as an adult for the trial.

Defence counsel Prashant Patil told news agency PTI that he opposed the prosecution's demand to treat the teenager as an adult, by citing some case laws. "We had cited a Supreme Court judgment - Shilpa Mittal Vs State in which the top court has defined what constitutes a heinous crime. The guidelines decided by the Supreme Court are binding on everyone. However, the plea by the prosecution is contrary to the apex court's judgment. We demanded that since the plea is contrary to the SC guidelines, it is not maintainable," Patil said.

To define a certain crime as heinous, the prosecution must have a section (invoked in the case) in which minimum punishment is seven years, he said.

"In the present case, there is not a single section which has a minimum punishment of seven years. So, we argued that the prosecution’s plea is not maintainable," the counsel added.

Meanwhile, Suresh Koshta, father of one of the two people killed in the crash, told NDTV that the decision to try the accused as a juvenile was another example of how money and power subvert the delivery of justice. "(From the) beginning the whole country pointed fingers at the functioning of the Juvenile Justice Board. A person who was drinking, driving a car ... how can he be considered a 'juvenile'?"

The father of the other victim, Om Prakash Awadhiya, said it was clear from the beginning "what we would get".