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Dilip Shaw @ Sanatan & Anr. v. The State of West Bengal & Ors.

Criminal Appeal · 2020 INSC 240Decided 2 Mar 2020
Criminal Appeal No. 1431 of 2013
Justice Deepak Gupta · Justice Aniruddha Bose

Background

The case arose from a 1981 incident in Howrah rooted in a family feud: a group of 14-15 people first assaulted one man, Sarban Singh, and then, as his family returned home, threw two bombs at them, fatally injuring Gurdev Singh and wounding several others. The trial court acquitted all the accused in 1987, citing inconsistencies in the evidence, but the Calcutta High Court reversed this in 2009, convicting the appellants of culpable homicide (Section 304 Part I read with Section 149 IPC, for being part of an unlawful assembly) and sentencing them to 10 years' imprisonment.

Decision Breakdown

Nearly four decades after the incident, the Supreme Court upheld the finding that the appellants were part of the same group with a shared "common object" to assault, based on consistent eyewitness testimony and the victim's dying declaration to a doctor, rejecting the trial court's reasoning as "fallacious." However, it found the random, untargeted way the bombs were hurled did not show an intention to kill any specific person, which meant the lesser offence under Section 304 Part II (culpable homicide without intent to cause death) applied instead of Part I. It reduced the sentence to 5 years' rigorous imprisonment, enhanced the fine to Rs. 50,000 per appellant (payable to the deceased's family as compensation), and shortened the default imprisonment term, while upholding the separate conviction under Section 148 IPC (and the Explosives Act for two of the appellants).

Lesson Learnt

Members of a group can be held collectively responsible for a death caused during a group attack (unlawful assembly) even if they did not personally strike the fatal blow, so long as a shared common object is proven, but the exact degree of the homicide charge, and the sentence, still turns on whether there was an intent to kill a specific victim or a lesser, more reckless intent to cause harm.

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

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