EMPEROR Vs. SIKANDAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Sikandar was charged under Section 302, I.P.C., before the Sessions Judge of Aligarh with having poisoned one Mt. Tufania by administering arsenic to her. The learned Sessions Judge acquitted the accused, and the Government has appealed.

(2.) The case for the prosecution was that the accused, who had illicit relations with the deceased woman, and also was in the habit of committing sodomy with her son, because the woman refused to leave the place in which she was then living and go and live with him, administered arsenic to her in gur on 22nd June 1929 and thereafter, within some twenty-four hours, she died as a result of arsenic poisoning.

(3.) The prosecution called three eye-witnesses who deposed that they had seen the accused giving the deceased gur. The witnesses also gave evidence that shortly afterwards the woman became very ill and vomited and purged. There was also on the record the statement of Mt. Tufania herself made to the police, which was admitted in evidence as a dying declaration. In that statement the woman said that the accused had illicit intimacy with her and also with her son; that she refused to go to Aligarh with him, and that afterwards he gave her gur to eat saying that it was a "parshad" from a Pir; that shortly afterwards she began to feel giddy and thirsty and drank water from a jar and that the water was bitter. She also said that the gur tasted bitter, and that she charged Sikandar with administering poison to her mixed with the gur. As regards the evidence of the three eyewitnesses, the learned Sessions Judge discards it on the ground that he was not satisfied that they were speaking the truth. We have carefully examined their evidence, and we have no reason to disagree with the finding of the learned Sessions Judge on this point. There remains, then, the evidence of the deceased woman herself as given in her dying statement. As regards the statement, the learned Sessions Judge came to the conclusion, from the internal evidence in the statement itself, that the statement was not given in the woman's own words but that it was merely a note of the substance of what she told the police. The learned Sessions Judge came to the conclusion that it would not be safe to convict the accused merely on the statement. We are in agreement with the learned Sessions Judge in the finding to which he came, and we see no reason to upset that finding and to convict the accused.