TAPRINESSA Vs. EMPEROR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The appellant before us one Taprinessa has been convicted under Sections 201 and 203 of the Indian Penal Code and sentenced Under the first named Section to three years rigorous imprisonment and under the second to two years rigorous imprisonment, the two sentences to run concurrently. It appears that on the night of the 13th July 1917 the husband of this woman named Sanghi was Murdered, it would seem, shortly after midnight. The medical evidence shows that the cause of death was a blow with some cutting weapon, such as a dao or knife, on the right side of the neck cutting the anterior and internal jugular veins and also outting into the third cervical vertebra and resulting, in the opinion of the medical officer, in instantaneous death. On the following morning the appellant accompanied the village Chowkidar, one Idhai, to the local Tianah and there with a number of details gave an account of the murder. She charged one Afiruddin, her next door neighbour, as one of the murderers.

(2.) The substantial question in the case before the learned Sessions Judge and in this appeal before us is whether that charge and the account given were false and were known by the appellant to be false Afiruddin has been examined as a witness in this case and he has denied the commission of this murder or being any party thereto. His denial is corroborated by the absence, as the Judge finds, of any motive on his part to commit this murder and by all his subsequent conduct. We have no doubt, therefore, that in so far as she charged this man with murder, that charge was not true.

(3.) The further question is, whether she knew that it was a false charge that she was making. The circumstances on which the Judge relies as showing that the woman was in fact an accomplice in the murder, though not sufficient to enable him or us to come to such a finding, are yet sufficient to show that in naming Afiruddin as one of the murderers she knew that she was stating what was not true. These circumstances, shortly stated, are these: The fact that to the neighbours whom she saw in the morning following the occurrence she named no one; that she named Afiruddin for the first time on her way with the Chowkidar to the Thana; that on the next following day she made to investigating Sub-Inspector an entirely different statement implicating three others and that op the 26th July she submitted from jail a petition in which she combines her two stories. That the charge was intentionally false is also clear by the delay that the woman made in giving the alarm of in arousing her neighbours, by the fact that at an earlier stage of the night she sought to call out one of her neighbours on a false pretext, by the fact that an the clothes she was wearing there were no stains of blood and by the absence of any of use of force or violence in the house in which she and her husband went to bed for the night. All these circumstances go to show that she knows far more about this murder than she was prepared to admit either at the time when she gave the first information or now. The reasonable inference from all this is that she in fact knew who the murderers were and that from some motive best known to her, possibly because of her quarrels some days before with Afiruddin s wife, she chose intentionally to implicate him.