Escaping the charges of law owing to lack of intention

Escaping the charges of law owing to lack of intention written by Prapti Kothari student of Institute of Law, Nirma university

PALANI GOUNDAN V. EMPEROR, MANU/TN/0395/1919

MATERIAL FACTS

With his wife, the appellant had an altercation. The appellant, infuriated throughout the disagreement, struck his spouse on the head with a ploughshare that caused the spouse to lose consciousness.
The appellant presumed she was mortally wounded and the accused attempted to manipulate with the facts and proofs of the scene of the crime in anticipation of being prosecuted for murder. Also, to establish the groundwork for the fabricated argument of suicide, which he eventually built, he managed to string her by a knot on a beam.
Subsequently, when the post mortem was carried out on the spouse’s body, it revealed that the first hit was not a lethal one and she managed to survive the ploughshare’s strike and was merely insentient then. The suffocation and oxygen deprivation by hanging, which was the appellant’s act, was the consequence of death.

ISSUE

Whether the accused is liable for the offense of Murder or is this case of Culpable Homicide?

LEGAL PROVISIONS

Sections 299 and 300 of Indian Penal Code, 1860

JUDGEMENT

The Hon’ble High Court overturned the session court’s decision and maintained that the appellant cannot be held liable for the offense of murder or culpable homicide. Conversely, he can only be held liable for the grievous hurt engendered when the ploughshare was being used to strike the victim and for interfering with proof.

ANALYSIS

One can infer from the findings in Palani Goudan v. Emperor that the appellant did not intend to cause the death of his wife when he struck her with the ploughshare. Asphyxiation was the catalyst for the victim’s death. A crucial factor of both meanings is the intention to trigger the death of an individual while reflecting on the explanations of culpable homicide and murder.

The victim had no intention of causing her death when he strung her up with a rope as he had presumed she was already dead and one cannot kill a dead person once again. This was not a case of murder or culpable homicide as the primary element of intention to cause death, was absent in both scenarios, when the accused hit the wife with a ploughshare and when he hanged her body.

Since the appellant had believed she was dead, he had no ‘mens rea’ of causing her death when he hanged her, as one cannot end the life of a person who is already dead. In both cases, when the appellant struck the spouse with a ploughshare and when he hanged her body, these were not the instances of either murder or culpable homicide as the main element of- ‘intention’ to trigger the death was missing.
Like in the commonly associated illustration of a shot fired at A (one individual) results in the killing B (another) or poison planned for A being consumed by another, B. It is not mandatory that intention should prevail with respect to the actual person whose death had been incurred. The requisite mens rea or intention persists even in such a case, and the homicide would contribute to murder. It is referred to as transferred mens rea.
Although, the intention is still a matter of fact and it may be an alleviating element and a valid consideration that the offender did not intend and plan to cause the injury which the victim endured, which saved the appellant from the charges of culpable homicide and murder, in the present case because no intention was proved from his side.
One can say that ‘causing death’ means to bring an end to one’s existence: and so all three intentions must be aimed either consciously to bring an end to one’s life or inflict any bodily injury that is likely to occur in causing the death of one’s life as per the knowledge of the offender. Knowledge must relate to the specific situations in which the offender is put. Undeniably, if a man stabs the heart of a human body, he performs an act which if it happens; he knows will bring an end to life.
It is evident that if a man kills someone by firing at what he thinks is a third individual he wants to kill, but which is actually the stub of a tree, he will be liable for culpable homicide. This is because he had such an intention towards what he considered to be a living human being, although he had no malicious intent towards any human being actually in life.

CONCLUSION

The inference that the intention of the offender must be determined is unavoidable, not only in the context of the real instances which took place but also in the sense of what the instances were intended to be. It implies that if one’s intention was exclusively guided to what he thought was a dead body; an individual cannot be convicted for culpable homicide/murder in this case.