KANAGA KOSVAN ALIAS KONAKACHALA KOSAVAN Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The appellant was convicted in the Sessions Court of Coimbatore of the offence of murder and sentenced to death. The charge against him was that on the 13 November, 1929, he murdered a woman named Unnamalai on a road between two villages not far from the village of Aranapalayam. The murder is alleged to have taken place between cock-crowing time and just after dawn because at the latter time P.W. No. 7 was informed that a woman was lying dead on the road to the north of the village and he went and saw the body which lay about two furlongs from his house. He identified the body as being that of a woman who had taken her meals and slept in his house the provioua night and had left the house a little before cockcrow together with the appellant. The woman and the appellant had come to the house the evening before and they asked for food and it was given to them and then the woman and the appellant slept on the pial that night. If the evidence of this witness is to be believed--and there is no apparent reason for disbelieving it--then the deceased was last seen in the company of the appellant very shortly before the hour at which she was murdered. The evidence does not stop there because there are other prosecution witnesses who speak to having seen the couple together before this. Two days before the occurrence they went to the house of P.W. No. 6 at Okkilipalayam and asked to be allowed to sleep on his pial and were allowed to do so and left the following morning. Prosecution witness No. 14 says that he saw them both together on the 7 November, and P.W. No. 16 saw them together in October-November. The evidence of these witnesses can be believed and indeed it in not disputed by the appellant that they did visit the house of P.W. No. 6 and the house of P.W. No. 7 on the days when those witnesses say they did, for he had made a long statement Ex. E. in which he admits having done so. This confession was subsequently retracted. His case in this confession is as follows : The deceased was trying in various places to find a house to live in. He accompanied her to those places but no house was available. They were travelling about from one place to another. On the day of occurrence at about 5 o clock in the morning after leaving P.W. No. 7's house the deceased sat down at the junction of the Arasapalayam and Seerapalayam roads refusing to go to her village to which she had been, advised by the appellant to return. He endeavoured to pursuade her to go to her village saying that they had gone about for five or six days in search off house but had found none but she lay down her by her hand and tried to make her get up. He said to her, " On account of you they are scandalising me too. I cannot be here any longer." She refused to go and lay down. She took the knife out of his waist, put it into his hand and asked him to cut and throw her away and be off. He said he would not do so but she seized the dhoti he was wearing and urged him to cut her. Thereupon he cut her neck with the knife. While she was holding his dhoti the knife hit her first on the left shoulder and caused an injury. He then went away to his village taking the knife with him and when the Police questioned him he gave the knife to them on Wednesday.

(2.) The learned Sessions Judge came to the conclusion that this confession Ex. E was a voluntary one and with that conclusion I entirely agree, Prosecution witness No. 1, the Stationary Sub-Magistrate who recorded the confession, says that he warned the accused that he was not bound to make any statement and that any statement he made might be used against him. The appellant had been sent on the 28 November, 1929, to the witness by the Podanur Police for remand and he also received a requisition from the Sub-Inspector to record his confession; but the witness did not record it on that day as the appellant had up to that time been in Police custody but examined him two days later in the meantime remanding him to the Central Jail, Coimbatore. There is no reason to suppose that the confession was other than a voluntary one. The body of the deceased woman was not officially discovered until the 15 although witnesses for the prosecution had seen it on the 14 without telling the authorities about it Prosecution Witness No. 7's evidence is corroborated by that of P.W. No. 8, and the dead body was seen by P.Ws. Nos. 9,10, 11 and 12. It was P.W. No. 12 who gave P.W. No. 13 the village Munsif the information about the corpse on the 15 November. The corpse had two injuries, a cut wound on the neck and one on the shoulder.

(3.) The earlier history of the relationship between the appellant and the deceased woman is that the appellant appears to have kept her up to some four years before the murder but there is no apparant motive for the murder though it is suggested by the prosecution that the appellant feeling that the deceased was an embarrassment murdered her in order to get rid of her. As against this theory there is the statement of the appellant that he was willingly accompanying the deceased during the last days of her life. An attempt was made to support the case against the appellant by evidence with regard to a gold bangle which, it is alleged, was in the possession of the deceased at the time of her murder.