SATTO Vs. STATE OF UTTAR PRADESH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Concurrent convictions by both the courts below have, by a rule of restriction and cirumspection which this court often adopts under Art. 136, persuaded me to circumscribe the leave to appeal to the critical question of punishment, usually answered by courts untouched by current humane criteria and drowned in the superstition that the gravity of the crime and the tariff prescribed in the Penal Code have a monopolistic hold on the sentencing court. Quackery in criminology is a deficiency in forensic justicing - especially disastrous in sensitive areas like juvenile sentencing when unfettered punishment becomes unwitting crime.

(2.) The present case is an illustration of judicial habituation to prescribing sentences conditioned by the offence and its milieu, forgetting the fundamental fact that the human delinquent, not the criminal deviance (sic), is the cynosure of punitive processing. The further Gandhian axiom follows that crime is like disease, and correction, not cruelty has dominance in the sentencing calculus. The sadistic appeal to severity of infliction takes on a sublimated form in the judicial process, as has happened in the instant case. The court has rightly been horrified by the crime of rape here but wrongly bid farewell to the reform of the vernal criminals.

(3.) Three boys, between the ages of ten and fourteen with simmering sex urges amidst societal inhibitions, and infatuating stimulations, came by an eleven year old girl tending cattle in a village, and this, by happenstance, was near a neglected brick kiln which temptingly offered protective privacy for carnal assault. This lacivious opportunity excited the three juveniles, otherwise engaged in cutting grass, into erotic experimentalism. They advanced aggressively towards the artless victim, tied up by way of preventive detention a young cowherd who chanced to be near the scene and forcibly went through the adolescent exercise of rape. The courts below have held the three petitioners guilty of an offence under S. 376, I. P. C. and we do not feel it right to nibble at probabilities and disturb that conclusion.