As per existing law, he was sent to a reform home for a period of three years, which ended on 20 December 2015. The impending release sparked off a fierce debate and a furious campaign led by the victim’s parents, to stop his release. The SC refused to stay the release on the grounds that further detention needed “legislative sanction” and the court was obliged to “go by the law as it stands today”. The court argued that the purpose of detention being reform, the process of reformation “may take seven to ten years” and legislative sanction was required for such repeated extensions. The court quite rightly stuck to the letter of the law.
However, a fall-out of this was a sustained campaign to amend the Juvenile Justice Act 2000. This was eventually amended so that with the 2015 Bill, “any person between the age of 16 and 18 years, who commits a heinous crime may be tried under the IPC and not the JJ Act if after a preliminary enquiry, the Juvenile Justice Board feels that the crime was committed with the full knowledge and understanding of the consequences”.
The antecedents to this development are highly questionable to say the least. The Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Maneka Gandhi on the grounds that juvenile crime was “the fastest rising crime” in the country. This was a totally fabricated statement. Statistics for the last three years show that juvenile crime has remained static at 1.2% of all crimes in the country. Two committees, the Parliamentary Standing Committee headed by Satyanarayan Jatiya a BJP MP, and the Verma committee led by the former CJI, both recommended that the age of the juvenile should not be reduced to 16 years. In making these recommendations, they considered extensive evidence from NGOs, Crime Records Bureau, scientific data on relapsing criminal behavior .
However it is scientific evidence that is both intriguing and neglected in the debate, and does not appear to support the amendment to reduce the age. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), US, conducted a study with MRI scans of the brains of nearly 1,000 healthy children between ages 3 and 18. He established a correlation between the psychological development related to impulse control, decision-making, judgment and emotions and the physical development of those areas of the brain which are responsible for such development namely the frontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex and the limbic systems. These areas he found, continue developing till the age of 25 years “and it is therefore unfair to expect adolescents to have adult levels of organizational skills or decision-making before their brain is finished being built.” Preeti Jacob, Assistant Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Bengaluru, voices similar concerns. “The 18 year cut-off is in itself an arbitrary number and lowering it further does not have its basis in current science,” she says. This is because dopamine production a chemical neurotransmitter produced by the brain that helps link actions to rewards and/or punishments, changes during adolescence.
The work of Sumantra Chatterjee, Professor of neurobiology, National Centre for Biological Sciences and head of the Centre for Brain Development and Repair at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, in Bengaluru has established that under conditions of chronic and severe stress in rats, the prefrontal cortex can shrink by up to 40%resulting in brain cells in these areas losing their capacity to process information properly. The hippocampus, which is crucial for forming memories of daily facts and events, is also damaged in a similar fashion. These areas suppress high risk behaviour contributing to “good behaviour”, and are compromised. On the other hand, with the same stress the amygdala, involved in fear, anxiety and aggression, is stimulated to grow bigger and stronger. In other words, the areas provoking “bad behaviour” thrive. MRI scans substantiate such findings in individuals suffering from chronic and severe stress disorders. What this means is that a stressed brain is damaged in such a manner as to lose its ability to control impulsive and risk-seeking behaviour; because the balance between the prefrontal cortex, and the areas of the brain it is supposed to control is lost. This may explain why a significant proportion of juvenile criminals come from economically and socially deprived backgrounds.
The juvenile brain is still developing, and therefore more amenable to and capable of change when in conflict with the law as a result of such imbalance. Achieving this requires regular visits assessed at a minimum of three or four times a month, by counsellors and mental health professionals to augment efforts at rehabilitation. No such attempt was made in this direction (which could have had a positive impact on the individual) either during the period of incarceration or thereafter. In fact tragically, no psychiatric screening was done nor was he ever visited by a mental health professional.
The pathetic attempts at rehabilitation consisted of giving him a one-time financial grant of Rs. 10, 00 and a sewing machine “as stated in the rehabilitation manual” (!). Our politicians found it much easier to play to the gallery, engage in vote bank politics, and support this farce by an irrational amendment to the law thereby changing its focus from rehabilitation to criminalization.
(Dr Gladstone D’Costa is the Chairman, Accreditation Committee and member, Executive Committee, Goa Medical Council.)
