Rajasthan: An error that sent Indian teen to death row for 25 years

Twenty five years ago, a teenage boy in India was wrongly sentenced to death as an adult for murder. In March, the Supreme Court freed him after confirming that he was a juvenile at the time of the incident.

The BBC's Soutik Biswas travelled to Jalabsar village in the state of Rajasthan to meet the man, now 41.

It has been a little over a week since Niranaram Chetanram Chaudhary was freed from the death row in a prison in India's western city of Nagpur.

He spent much of his 28 years, six months and 23 days in custody - 10,431 days in total - by pacing back and forth in his 12ft by 10ft maximum security cell, reading books, taking exams and trying to prove that he had been found guilty and sentenced before turning 18.

Niranaram was on death row for the 1994 murder of seven people - five women and two children - in the city of Pune. He had been arrested - along with two other men - from his village in Rajasthan. In 1998, he was sentenced to death on the assumption that he was 20.

In March, India's Supreme Court finally ended Niranaram's three-decade long ordeal, involving three courts, countless hearings, changing laws, appeals, a mercy petition, age determination tests and a search for his birth date papers.

The judges concluded that Niranaram was 12 years and six months old - or a juvenile - at the time of the offence. (Under Indian laws, a juvenile cannot be sentenced to death, and the maximum punishment for all crimes is three years.)

How had such an egregious miscarriage of justice happened, condemning a teenager to the death row?

For reasons that are not entirely clear, the police had recorded an incorrect age - and name - when Niranaram was arrested.

His name was wrongly noted as Narayan in a memo prepared by the police at the time of arrest. Nobody quite knows when an erroneous age was first recorded. "His arrest records are very old. The original trial papers didn't even reach the Supreme Court," said Shreya Rastogi of Project 39A, a criminal justice programme at Delhi's National Law University. (Niranaram's release followed a nine-year-long effort by the programme.)

Surprisingly, the mistake in his birth date and the claim of juvenility was not raised by the courts, prosecutors and defence lawyers until very late in the case - 2018. Absence of birth certificates means many Indians, especially in rural areas, are unaware of their birthdates - Niranaram was one of them.

What eventually saved him was an entry in an old in his village school showing his date of birth as 1 February 1982. There was also a school transfer certificate with dates of his ing and leaving the school and a certificate from the village council head attesting that Narayan and Niranaram were the same person.

"The entire system failed. The prosecutors, defence lawyers, the courts, the investigators. We simply failed to how old he was at the time of the incident," said Ms Rastogi.

Last week, we drove through a hot and parched landscape of sand flats, scrubs and wilting trees to reach Jalabsar, a village of 600 homes and 3,000 people in Bikaner in Rajasthan. Here Niranaram, born to a farmer father and homemaker mother, had returned to live with his extended family of four brothers, their wives and a dozen nephews.

Set against encroaching dunes and sprawling farms, the village appeared to be reasonably prosperous. The silent, half-deserted streets were flanked by houses covered with satellite dishes and water tanks. The walls of the local school were emblazoned with names of villagers who had donated money and material.

"Why did this happen to me? I lost the prime of my life because of a simple mistake," Niranaram, a tall and wiry man with sunken eyes, told me.

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