MT. NANHI GOND Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE appellant is a Gond widow, whose present age is recorded as fifty-five. She entered a detached house in a village in the late afternoon, by pulling off the padlock, which was apparently flimsy, and took some wheat from grain-bin inside and wrapped it up in a couple of rags that were there. The value of the grain is two rupees and that of the rags a few annas only. The owner of the house returned while she was still inside and caught her. For this, mainly on account of her previous history, she has been sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for three years.

(2.) AFTER recording a. conviction on the plea of guilty, the learned Sessions Judge said in his judgment that under Clause (b) of Section 310 of the Criminal P.C., he refrained from trying the charge of the previous convictions; he nevertheless proceeded at once to try it. Further, after finding all the alleged convictions proved, on Nanhi's own admission, he repeated that he declined to proceed against her on the charge of the previous convictions, and then proceeded to proceed against her on it, to the extent of passing a sentence of rigorous imprisonment for three years for an offence for which she would not otherwise have been sent to jail at all, but released under Section 562 of the Criminal P.C.

(3.) THE learned Judge has remarked that in this case sentence should not be retributive. The words clearly are misused, for otherwise they indicate that, in his opinion, sentences should be so in some cases, The causing of merely retributive harm, whether by the community or the individual, is itself a crime. Punishment is in itself an evil, justified only by its prevention of greater evil, that is by its effects in deterring the offender from a repetition of the offence and in deterring others, by his example, from the commission of it. In each case also it must obviously be the least that will produce both these effects.