(1.) In this case the three appellants were charged with abduction and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The woman abducted was aged about 22 and was the wife of a chaukidar. Her husband was away from time to time and she lived with her brother-in law who was an invalid. The case for the prosecution was that on one night the accused with a number of others entered the hut, dragged her out and took her away. They moved her from place to place and eventually took her to a prostitute. There seems to be some suggestion that she was to be sold for purposes of prostitution. While with this woman, she came across a daffadar to whom she told her story and eventually she was brought home.
(2.) The case for the defence was that two of the accused were not there at all and that the first accused Kamiraddi had gone with her at her own wish, because she was not happy with her husband. The case for the defence is confirmed in rather a startling manner by the diary of a daroga to whom the daffadar took her. In that it is stated that she went away of her own free will, because she was unhappy in her husband's house. This evidence, if believed, obviously destroys the case for the prosecution. We have been handicapped in dealing with this appeal, because a considerable part of the copy of charge of the Assistant Sessions Judge of Faridpur is unintelligible. The time and energies of this Court cannot be wasted by having to interpret into English charges which, according to the rules, are supposed to be already in that language. Many of the charges which we have to deal with now-a-days are written in such imperfect English that it is only with great difficulty that an Englishman can understand them. This, in my opinion, is a particularly bad case. Literally I have not been able to understand either the case for the prosecution or the defence. Greater care must be taken to see that the copy of the Judge's charge is written in understandable English so that we may be able to ascertain without puzzling ourselves what was the meaning of the Judge which he intended to convey to the jury. Further, the copy must be split up into sentences and paragraphs and properly punctuated, to enable one to read it easily. This copy does not offend so much as many in that way, because some attempt has been made to divide it into paragraphs. But some of those paragraphs are of such inordinate length that it is almost impossible without a good deal of trouble to grasp what the paragraph is intended to convey. The charge itself suffers from various defects. In a sense it is better than some charges which come before us: in another sense it is worse.
(3.) The learned Judge has not followed any system or sequence or plan, which not only makes the charge difficult to understand when read, but must have made it still more difficult for a jury to understand when it was spoken to them, without the possibility of pausing to consider what had been said?pauses such as are possible for us to make when reading the record. Some sequence must be adopted by a Judge in charging a jury. As was said by one learned Judge, any sort of sequence will do, preferably chronological, but even alphabetical sequence is better than none at all. In this charge the learned Judge has gone forward with the story, and then broken off, and then retraced his steps in a way so confusing that his charge cannot have been of much assistance to the jury. However he has triumphed over these difficulties by summing up so strongly in favour of the prosecution that the jury took only three minutes to consider their verdict. As I have said before, there is nothing wrong in the Judge expressing his own opinion to the jury. On the contrary, if he has got an opinion, he ought to express it. But he must tell the jury that they are the sole judges of fact, that they must form their own opinion independently, after a consideration of the facts and circumstances in the case, and that they need not accept or follow his opinion but must follow their own. It is not sufficient for the Judge to give them this warning in a formal way either at the beginning or at the end of the charge. The warning must be given at the moment when he has forcibly or otherwise expressed his own opinion to the jury. There is nothing wrong in a Judge forming a strong opinion of the case either of the prosecution or of the defence, and as strongly expressing it to the jury. But he ought not to form such a strong opinion, nor express it, when the evidence is such that any reasonable person ought to be in reasonable doubt about which story they ought to believe. In our opinion, this is such a case. On the evidence of the entry in the Daroga's diary, strongly corroborating and confirming the story for the defence, it was most dangerous for the Judge to express himself strongly one way or the other, and whatever opinion he happened to form, he ought studiously to have left the decision to the jury and not to have tried to influence them in favour of a verdict of "guilty".