CHANDRA SINGH Vs. STATE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The Appellant Chandra Singh was tried by Mr. Justice Sen at a recent sitting of the Criminal Sessions of this Court with the aid of a special Jury and convicted under Section 366A of the Indian Penal Code upon a unanimous verdict. The sentence passed on her was rigorous imprisonment for two years. She has appealed from her conviction and sentence.

(2.) The appeal has had a rather chequered history. Originally, the petition of appeal was sent directly from jail and as no one was appearing on behalf of the Appellant at that stage, it was treated as an undefended appeal. The Criminal Appellate Bench at that time was constituted of S.R. Das Gupta J. and myself. After I had completed the consideration of the papers, I passed them on to S.R. Das Gupta J., with my observations, but before he could consider the appeal, the Appellant was able to instruct counsel to appear on her behalf. Mr. Dutt informed us that he had been instructed to appear and thereupon the appeal was transferred to the defended list.

(3.) Mr. Dutt also informed us of one other matter which has given rise to a rather unusual point in the appeal. He presented before us a petition in which it was stated that on July 12, 1952, that is, the date next following that on which the trial was concluded, the foreman of the jury, one Ernest William George Robertson, saw the clerk of the State and informed him that there had been a grave miscarriage of justice the previous evening in the last stages at the trial in that he, the said foreman, under a misapprehension as to the procedure to be followed by jury, had wrongly and mistakenly given the verdict as a unanimous verdict of the jury when the said jury was really and in fact divided in the proportion of 5 to 4.