NEW DELHI: A spat with mother-in-law cannot be a reason to dilute a murder charge by treating it a case of sudden and grave provocation, the Supreme Court has held while affirming the life imprisonment of a woman who killed her five-year-old child after an altercation with her mother-in-law.
“Even if it be taken that there was a quarrel of the appellant with her mother-in-law on the morning of the date of the incident because she wanted to go to her father’s place, it cannot be said that such a quarrel would make it a case of grave and sudden provocation,” said a bench of justices Dinesh Maheshwari and Bela M Trivedi in a judgment delivered on Wednesday.
According to the bench, a squabble with her mother-in-law cannot be a legal defence for the accused woman to bring the murder case against her under the fold of an offence committed due to sudden and grave provocation, as recognised under Exception 1 to Section 300 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
The doctrine of sudden and grave provocation is used to reduce the criminal liability of an accused from murder to culpable homicide not amounting to murder in cases of an intentional killing. Exception 1 to Section 300 lays down that culpable homicide is not murder if the offender, whilst deprived of the power of self-control by grave and sudden provocation, causes the death of the person who gave the provocation or causes the death of any other person by mistake or accident. While the minimum punishment for murder is life imprisonment, a person can be jailed for a lesser term.
The top court was adjudicating an appeal by a woman, who was sentenced to life term for strangling her child in June 2007 at a village in Tamil Nadu following a quarrel with her mother-in-law. The prosecution claimed that the two women had strained relationship but the woman was forced to live with her mother-in-law for raising the child in her matrimonial home. The prosecution brought on record a bundle of incriminating circumstantial materials to establish her crime.
The trial court as well as the Madras high court convicted the woman after noting that the prosecution successfully established a chain of cogent circumstances which could lead to the only hypothesis that the she killed her own child.
In her appeal before the Supreme Court, the woman’s lawyer cited some discrepancies in the statements of a few witnesses, besides stressing on the point that the case did not fall under the murder charge due to the altercation between the two women. The lawyer contended even if the accusations against her are taken into consideration, it cannot not be a case beyond culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
But the bench turned down the appeal, and upheld the conviction and the punishment. It noted that although the case presents a “somewhat difficult proposition” where a woman has killed her child due to her frustration of staying in the matrimonial home, but the facts and circumstances of the case brought home her guilt.
