If only they’d checked my age: Juvenile on death row for 28 years walks free | India News

All it took was the stroke of a pen. In that one unthinking move, a 12-year-old boy’s identity was seised, pushing him into a life of solitary confinement in a prison’s “phaansi” yard (death row block) for over 28 years. “Every sunrise brings with it the question if this will be your last,” says Niranaram Chetanram Chaudhary describing the years spent on death row.
In a cruel twist of fate, Chaudhary’s name was misspelled as Narayan instead of Niranaram and registered as a 22-year-old at the time of arrest. In the next four years, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for murdering five people in August 1994 as Narayan. It took 28 years for the justice system to realise and acknowledge that Chaudhary was, in fact, a juvenile at the time of the crime and should have been treated differently. Last month, following a Supreme Court ruling, Chaudhary walked out a free man. The stroke of a pen had changed his fate again.
Tried as an adult, Chaudhary was sentenced to death in 1998. Between 1999 and 2000 his appeals were rejected both at the high court and the Supreme Court and a review petition was also dismissed.

Known for the better part of his life as C-7432 (convict), Chaudhary spent his time teaching himself to read and write English. “When you are on death row, every hope is broken. You just try to get through the day,” he says. In the hope of studying further, he asked his family to send his school transfer certificate. This was when he realised, for the first time, that he was much younger than the prison records reflected. Around the same time, he read about changes in the Juvenile Justice Act. “It dawned on me that I was 12 years old at the time of the crime and I could not be hanged,” he says. A medical examination confirmed he was much younger than what police and courts had declared at the time of the crime.
Over the next several years Chaudhary and his family wrote letters to jail authorities and courts but with no success. “After every rejection I thought I cannot give up. I might die but I will die fighting,” he says. He used this time to devour books, earning a master’s in sociology, reading up case law and devouring Chetan Bhagat novels.
In 2014, National Law University’s Project 39A, that works on death penalty reform, took up the case and filed a petition in the Supreme Court, setting in motion a review to verify Chaudhary’s identity and age. The SC ordered an inquiry, which found that Chaudhary was 12 and a half years old at the time of the offence. The documents that proved crucial included his name on the school register at the time of admission, date of birth certificate, OBC certificate and the family’s ration card. “All these documents were placed before the court and it took five years for the court to decide that he is in fact a juvenile,” says Shreya Rastogi, co-founder and director, death penalty litigation at Project 39A.
Rastogi says, “It boggles the mind to think about the challenges Chaudhary has gone through in this journey. The fact that he was released from prison is not a sign that the system worked, but that the system has failed. He was left to figure out how to prove his juvenility by himself.”
The passage of time moves slowly in the anda cell of a prison but the world has moved very quickly. When he first reached his village in Rajasthan’s Jalabsar, Chaudhary met his mother for the first time in 28 years and was unable to understand her as he could no longer remember the Rajasthani dialect spoken at home. He tasted pizza for the first time last week and can’t wait to watch a Vin Diesel movie. The crowds, smartphones, cars whizzing past are all hard to keep up with. And out of sheer habit he has “recreated” his jail cell at home preferring a small room on the terrace to the house downstairs. “I have spent so many years inside the four walls of a cell under bright lights. Now I switch off all the lights and watch the stars in the night sky,” he says.