The father of the 23-year-old Indian woman who died after being gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi last month has demanded changes in the law to allow a teenage suspect to be tried as an adult.
“It will be a crime to let a man who committed such a heinous crime go scot-free. We will go to court and appeal. We will do whatever we have to convict him like the other five accused,” the girl’s distraught father said from his one-room tenement in a Delhi suburb.
He was reacting to Monday’s court ruling that the sixth suspect in the case would be tried as a juvenile and would face a maximum prison term of three years if convicted.
The Juvenile Justice Board in Delhi has accepted the juvenile’s school certificate as proof of his age and rejected demands for a bone density test to be conducted to check this.
Consequently, the boy (17) will also walk free in June upon attaining the age of 18 as he cannot, under the law, continue to remain in custody in the juvenile facility or be sent to jail after that.
