RAMASWAMI GOUNDEN Vs. KING EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Officiating Chief Justice.--The accused Ramasawmi Gounden has been couvicted by the Sessions Judge of Coimbatore of the murder of one Angayi and sentenced to death. The case for the prosecution briefly is, that after the deceased Angayi had been deserted by her husband some years ago, she used to work as a servant under the accused; that during that time the accused, who was a widower, kept her that he having since married again broke off the connection with the deceased; that the latter had been in the habit of dunning the accused for money for expenses, which she sometimes got; that on or about the 8 June last she again applied for pecuniary help to the accused, who was then in his field; that on his refusing to comply with her request she would not leave the place but lay down there threatening to disgrace him publicly before his relatives who had come for the festival fieri about to take place in the adjacent village of Malayampundi; that later on that night the accused struck the deceased who still persisted in staying in the field with a crowbar on the head, killed her and threw her body into a grainpit 10 or 12 feet deep some distance off in a field of one of his cousins and covered tip the place.

(2.) The case thus set up practically rests on the evidence of Velappa Gounden, a boy of about 16 or 18 who was, at the time of the murder, living with and under the protection of, the accused and working for him, the accused holding in his hands what little money belonged to the witness. Velappa speaks to the intimacy which had previously existed between the deceased and the accused, to her demanding money from the accused on the occasion in question, to the accused's refusal, to the threat by the woman as aforesaid, to the infliction of the fatal blow by the accused and. to the concealment of the body in the pit where it was found upon his giving information some days later. Though the witness did not admit that he assisted the accused in removing the body from the place of murder to the pit and covering it up, yet the Sessions Judge was of opinion that the witness was most likely to have done so. Having regard to the circumstances in which the witness was working under the accused, it is not probable that he would have ven ured to disobey if, as is likely, the accused, assuming him to be the murderer, had required him to help in concealing the body. In dealing with this case it is perhaps better to proceed as if Velappa had assisted the accused in the way supposed, though I cannot say, I believe he did so assist.

(3.) Proceeding on some such assumption, the learned Counsel for the appellant contended that Velappa being an accomplice and his evidence being uncorroborated in respect of anything tending to connect the accused with the murder, the trial court would, if the case had been tried before a jury, have been bound to direct the jury to acquit the accused and consequently this Court ought to acquit him; and he more than once invited us to lay down the law on the point, as if the question had not long since passed the stage of controversy and as if the rules on the point required fresh enunciation. But the whole subject of accomplice testimony has been over and over considered and expatiated upon. As shown in the leading Indian case of Elahee Buksh 5 W.R.Cr. 80 in which Sir Barnes Peacock went into the whole matter exhaustively, the Indian law on the subject has been borrowed from the English law and it is not necessary now more than to refer to Reg. V/s. Boyes 9 Cox. C.C.p. 32 S.C. 1 B. & S. 311 as containing, so far as I am aware, the practically final statement of the law in England in no uncertain terms.