MEANWHILE: Justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done
The heart of one mother is distraught at the disturbingly short prison term handed down to a man who was a boy when he participated in the gang-rape of her daughter and helped inflict wounds that led to her death.
The eyes of the mother of the rapist and killer will betray relief, despite earlier statements to the contrary, because her son will walk free in about 28 months.
There can be no stronger reason for an immediate review of the country's juvenile laws.
The problem lies in defining the severity of punishment of children who have committed the most despicable crimes
The teenager, who was 17 when he committed a crime so shocking in its brutality that an entire country felt the pain, has received three years in prison: the maximum permitted under the law.
In his case it is the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000.
Three years minus the time he has already spent not incarcerated but restricted to a special home for juveniles.
Under the laws that govern adults he would have faced death by hanging.
The words in parentheses in the full form of the juvenile law are a pointer to one of the reasons why the Supreme Court rejected demands to lower the upper age limit defining a juvenile from 18 to 16 after the government said it was not contemplating any reduction.
Harsher punishment of, say, a 13-year-old, would effectively end a child's chance of a normal life.
But in this case the boy was almost an adult.
The problem lies in defining the severity of punishment of children who have committed the most despicable crimes.
The court cannot make an exception as that would lead to arguments of judicial precedent in later cases.
The exception would become the norm.
Inscribing in stone a definition to decide that a particular case is the "rarest of the rare" is another problem.
One solution might be to amend the law to create age sub-divisions below the upper limit of 18 years and prescribe different degrees of severity of punishment for the various subgroups.
This would mean, in effect, that sentence passed on a 17-year-old could be, by law rather than discretion, far harsher than that passed on a 13 or 14-year-old.
Justice in the eyes of the many can seem unjust; not only must it be done, it must also be seen to be done.
