Supreme Court: In a criminal appeal filed by the convicts against the Allahabad High Court judgment, wherein the Court upheld the conviction order of the convicts for murder, the division bench of Sudhanshu Dhulia and Ahsanuddin Amanullah, JJ. converted the conviction under Section 3021 of the Penal Code, 1860 (‘IPC’) to that of Section 3042 Part-I of IPC, and thereby converted the sentence of life imprisonment of all the convicts to that of seven years rigorous imprisonment along with a fine of Rs.25,000/- to be given by each convict within a period of eight weeks from today to the victim’s family.
Background:
On 19-04-1984, a fight between children of two families for ‘mangoes’, resulted in the family of the convict attacking the deceased, father of one of the children involved. The five accused named in the FIR were armed with “lathis”. The deceased was the one who got injured and was taken to the hospital at Gonda by bullock cart where he was declared “dead”.
The convicts were tried for offences under Sections 302, 1473, 1494, 3235 of IPC and have been convicted by the Additional Sessions Judge for offences under Sections 147,323, 149 and Section 302 read with Section 149 of IPC and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Five accused had filed an appeal before the Allahabad High Court. During the pendency of the appeal before the High Court, out of the five accused, two of them passed away. For the remaining three accused, the High Court upheld the conviction and sentence. Aggrieved the convicts filed this present appeal.
Issue: Whether this is a case of murder or a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder under Exception 4 of Section 3006 of IPC?
Analysis and Decision:
After perusing the postmortem report, the Court noted that some injuries were fatal, and the deceased’s skull was fractured which ultimately led to his death.
The Court also referred to exception 4 of Section 300 of the IPC.
The Court noted that this is not a case of pre-planned murder as the incident started with a fight between children for “mangoes” which unfortunately flared up when the adults of the families also got involved which ultimately led to the deceased, the father of one of the children, being killed.
After considering the totality of the facts and circumstances of the case, the nature of the injuries and also considering the nature of the weapon used, the Court said that it is indeed a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and it is not murder.
Therefore, the Bench converted the findings of Section 302 of IPC to that of Section 304 Part-I of IPC, and thereby converted the sentence of life imprisonment of all the convicts to that of seven years rigorous imprisonment along with a fine of Rs.25,000/- to be given by each convict to be deposited within a period of eight weeks from today to the victim’s family. For this, the Court fixed the responsibility of District Magistrate Gonda, U.P for compliance.
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