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Bhagwan Singh v. The State of Uttarakhand

Criminal Appeal · 2020 INSC 310Decided 18 Mar 2020
Criminal Appeal No. 407 of 2020
Chief Justice S.A. Bobde · Justice B.R. Gavai · Justice Surya Kant

Background

During his son's wedding procession in 2007, the appellant, standing on his roof, fired celebratory gunshots from a licensed firearm pointed toward the roof. The pellets struck five people in the courtyard below, and two of them, a woman and a young man, later died of their injuries. The trial court convicted him of murder (Section 302 IPC) and attempted murder (Section 307 IPC), sentencing him to life imprisonment; the Uttarakhand High Court upheld the conviction. The Supreme Court had granted limited leave only on the narrow question of whether the offence was correctly classified as murder.

Decision Breakdown

The Court found, based on eyewitness testimony, that the appellant had aimed his shots toward the roof rather than directly at any individual, which ruled out an intention to kill. However, it held he could not escape liability altogether: carrying a loaded gun and firing it in a crowded space during a wedding, without taking basic safety precautions such as firing into the air, meant he must be deemed to have had knowledge that his act was likely to cause death. This amounted to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, punishable under Section 304 Part II IPC (rather than Section 302), and the injuries to the other victims were reclassified as attempt to commit culpable homicide under Section 308 IPC (rather than Section 307). The sentence was correspondingly reduced from life imprisonment to 10 years' rigorous imprisonment.

Lesson Learnt

Celebratory or ceremonial gunfire with a loaded firearm in a crowd is not a trivial act, even without any intention to harm a specific person, the law treats it as culpable homicide because the shooter is deemed to know such conduct is likely to cause death or serious injury.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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