Rowland, J.Gedka Goala was put on his trial before the Sessions Judge of Purnea and four assessors charged with murder of his wife Musammat Reshmi, his daughters Budhsar and Dilsar and his son Sadhu, with causing grievous hurt to his son Budhu and with causing hurt to his Mother Musammat Neno. The accused was living in Patharghatti, and on Friday, June 19, 1936, he was in his own house with his wife Reshmi, his daughters Budhsar and Dilsar and his sons Budhu and Sudhu. He attacked all these persons with a heavy cutting knife dao. He was interrupted by the return to his house of his mother Neno whom also he attacked and wounded with the dao. The next to come was his brother-in-law Nunu Lal, seeing whom he said he had killed others and would kill him (Nunu Lal) too. Nunu Lal saved himself by flight. Gedka then picked up the boy Budhu and went out carrying him to the house of Ahmad Ali. He asked Ahmad Ali for water and poison to kill himself as he had finished everybody" but went away to Murhi Bechi to the house of his brother Ledka announcing his intention of killing the latter and his wife. They, however, concealed themselves. At about 3 P.M. he came to Bibiganj where he met an excise peon Mir Ekbal who had the (sic) of mind to disarm and arrest the accused and made him over to Kharkhara Manjhi, Dafadar, along with the bloodstained knife. The occurrence was proved by the boy Budhu Gope, who survived his injuries and accuseds mother Neno who was not seriously wounded and accuseds father Hathia and the subsequent movements of the accused by Ahmad Ali, Mir Ekbal and Kharkhara Manjhi.

2. The medical evidence proved that the death of the wife, two daughters and son was due to incised injuries inflicted with a sharp weapon such as the dao produced (Ex. 2) and the injuries on Neno and Budhu could be inflicted by the same weapon. The accused made a confession before a Magistrate on June 22, 1936, but at the trial his statement is that he was not in his senses and does not know what he did and what he did not do and cannot remember whether he made a confession. The Sessions Judge and all four assessors were of opinion that the facts were proved and no other view of the case is possible and the only defence that could be taken at the trial was that by reason of unsoundness of mind the accused was not responsible for his actions. This defence was accepted by the Sessions Judge in agreement with all the assessors and the learned Judge on finding that the accused committed the acts charged but is not guilty in view of the provisions of Section 84, Indian Penal Code, acquitted the accused but has directed that he be detained in custody pending orders from the Local Government u/s 471, Criminal Procedure Code. The Local Government have preferred this appeal, and it is contended that the learned Sessions Judge has proceeded on a wrong view of the law regarding criminal responsibility, that it should have been held that the accused at the time of doing the acts knew what he was about and was liable to be convicted. For the respondent it has not been contended that accused did not do the acts charged and the evidence abundantly establishes those facts. Therefore, the only question that remains is whether the Court below was right in the view taken regarding the absence of criminal responsibility by reason of unsoundness of mind. The law is in Section 84, Indian Penal Code:

Nothing is an offence which is done by a person who at the time of doing it, by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to law.

3. This provision was examined in Queen Empress v. Kedar Nasyar Shah 23 C 604, a leading case which has been repeatedly followed. The learned Judges point out that the rule is in substance the same as that laid down in the answers of the Judges to the questions put to them by the House of Lords in Daniel MNaghtens case (1843) 10 C & F 200 : 3 Scott. NR 595 : 1 C & K 30 : 4 St. Tr. (NS) 847 : 59 RR 85. It is pointed out that:

Insanity affects not only the cognitive faculties of the mind which guide our actions, but also our emotions which prompt our actions and the will by which our actions are performed.

4. And they say that:

It is only unsoundness of mind which materially impairs the cognitive faculties of the mind that can form a ground of exemption from criminal responsibility, the nature and the extent of the unsoundness of mind required being such as would make the offender incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is wrong or contrary to law. Instances of unsoundness of mind of this description would be such as these: A person strikes another and in consequence of an insane delusion thinks he is breaking a jar. Here he does not know the nature of the act. Or he may kill a child under an insane delusion that he is saving him from gin and sending him to heaven Here he is incapable of knowing by reason of insanity that he is doing what is morally wrong. Or he may under insane delusion believe an innocent man whom he kills to be a man that was going to take his life; in which case by reason of his insane delusion he is incapable of knowing that he is doing, what is contrary to the law of the land.

5. Apart from such delusions the Judges were not prepared to accept the view that a person is entitled to exemption from criminal liability in cases in which it is only shown that he is subject to insane impulses while the cognitive faculties remain, so far as can be judged from his acts and words, unimpaired. In the case before them the learned Judges though finding that the circumstances indicated that the accused must at the time of the acts charged have been suffering from mental derangement of some sort, upheld the conviction on the ground that the circumstances did not show him to have been devoid of knowledge of the nature of his act or that he was doing what was wrong and contrary to law. In that case there had been evidence of mental derangement both before and after the occurrence. The murder was committed without any sane motive, and at the time when the case came up for preliminary inquiry, the accused was found to be not in a fit state of mind to be able to make his defence and a delay of a year intervened before the inquiry was resumed. Two English cases have been referred to at the hearing before us as illustrative of the manner in which a Court should address itself to the question of criminal responsibility: one is R. v. Michael Stokes (1848) 175 ER 514 : 3 Car. & K 185. The prisoner Stokes was charged with murder for which no rational motive was apparent It was argued in his defence that there was a class of lunatics who are driven to commit homicide by a sudden and merely blind and instinctive impulse, without consciousness of the nature of the act". Baron Rolfe impressed upon the jury that every man is held responsible for his acts if he can discern right from wrong; He said:

It is true that learned speculators, in their writings have laid it down that men, with a consciousness that they were doing wrong, were irresistibly impelled to commit some unlawful act. But who enabled them to dive into the human heart; and see the real motive that prompted the commission of such deeds.... It is true that there is no motive apparent, but a very inadequate one; but it is dangerous ground to take to say that a man must be insane because men fail, to discern the motive for his act It has also been said by the prisoners Counsel that the conduct of the prisoner was that of a mad man in committing the offence at such a time, in the presence of the womans husband, who had arms within his reach; but it would be a most dangerous doctrine to lay down, that because a man committed a desperate offence, with the chance of instant death, or the certainty of future punishment before him, he was therefore insane, as if the perpetration of crimes was to be excused by their very atrocity.

6. A. similar case was R. v. Haynes (1859) 175 ER 898 : 1 F & F 666. Baron Bramwell told the jury:

It has been urged for the prisoner that you should acquit him on the ground that, it being impossible to assign any motive for the perpetration of the offence, he must have been acting under what is called a powerful and irresistible influence, or homicidal tendency. But I must remark as to that, that the circumstance of an act being apparently motiveless is not a ground from which you can safely infer the existence of such an influence. Motives exist unknown and innumerable which might prompt the act. A morbid and restless (but resistible) thirst for blood would itself be a motive urging to such a deed for its own relief. But if an influence be so powerful as to be termed irresistible, so much the more reason is there why we should not withdraw any of the safeguards tending to counteract it. There are three powerful restraints existing, all tending to the assistance of the person who is suffering under such an influence, the restraint of religion, the restraint of conscience, and the restraint of law. But if the influence itself be held a legal excuse, rendering the crime dispunishable, you at once withdraw a most powerful restraint, that forbidding and punishing its perpetration. We must, therefore, return to the simple question you have to determine, did the prisoner know the nature of the act he was doing and did he know that he was doing what was wrong

7. Now the Sessions Judge has said that there was a mental derangement beyond doubt and,

the very nature of the act goes to show that the derangement was such that the accused could not have known the nature of the act he was doing.

8. And he says:

I cannot believe that a man in his senses can commit a murder like this. The very act itself shows that there was a serious derangement of the brain of the accused at the time he committed the act.

9. The test which the learned Sessions Judge applied is plainly in view of the pronouncements above cited, inadequate. A. crime is not excused by its own atrocity. One must look outside the act itself for the evidence as to how much the accused knew about it. The central point for examination is whether the accused knew that he was killing human beings, or was under a disorder which made him unaware that he was doing so. The sole eye-witness of the first assault is Budhu. His evidence does not disclose that the accused said anything at the time of the assault in his own house but he shut the door before beginning it, and this agrees with what the prisoner himself said in his confession on June 22. It has the look of a preparation for the deed. The accused does not appear to have said anything to his mother Musammat Neno whom he struck on her coming into the house, but he threatened the life of his brother-in-law, Nunu Lal saying he had killed others and will kill him too. Then when he met Ahmad Ali he first asked for water and poison "to kill himself as he had finished everybody"; but as Ahmad Ali said he should hand over the dao first, the accused did not take the water or the poison saying that he would go on to Murhi Bechi and kill his brother and sister-in-law. He did go to Murhi Bechi, but his proposed victims escaped and hid. On this evidence I see no room to doubt that accused knew what killing was and meant to do it, knew what he had done already, knew who were his brother and his sister-in-law and where they lived and the way to that place. Therefore, so far as the nature of the act is concerned, the accused not only was capable of knowing it but did know it as well as any sane man. The confession of June 22, is to be considered in this connection. The confession shows that the accused had a clear recollection of what he had done. He says: "After feeding my children I began to cut them"; and "after shutting the window of the house I began to inflict cuts". With this clear statement of what he had himself done, the accused joins a curious explanation of why he did it. He says the neighbours used to call his wife a witch and himself an ojha, that they wanted to kill him and his wife and used to catch them and bring them back when they tried to escape, that his wife used to say "if you will die, I shall be free"; that Dhan Lal Barhis brother said to accuseds brother-in-law "He has become mad. Bring pigeons and make him eat (them and he will be cured". The accused says "We ate pigeons". Unfortunately the evidence gives little assistance in determining whether these are true statements of fact or are the outcome of delusion from which the accused was suffering or are invented or imagined by him to excuse acts which he knew to be wrong. He says; Then what did God do to me, whether some evil spirit possessed me or what happened (I do not know)".

10. From this we can learn that at the time of the confession he knew the act to be evil, but was unable to account for the impulse which drove him to it, except by imagining some external interference with his will. The accuseds brother-in-law, Nunu Lal, was not asked whether Dhan Lal Barhi s brother proposed to feed accused on pigeons to cure him. Accuseds father Hathia says that Reshmi was not believed to be a witch nor was the accused an ojha; that it is not a fact that the villagers wanted to take the life of the accused and his wife or chased them, and he never heard Reshmi saying to the accused that it were better if he were dead. There is evidence that at the time of the occurrence the alarm was raised and people spoke of accused as a mad man. That was an opinion, not an expert diagnosis. Assuming it to be a natural inference from his acts, it does not assist us in drawing the line which has to be drawn between insane impulses and delusions affecting the cognitive faculties. There is evidence as to the condition of accused during the four or five days immediately preceding the occurrence. Prior to that no sign of madness had been observed, but for four or five days before the occurrence we have it from the accuseds mother Neno that he did no work and used to sit still and behave as if he was dumb. Shaikh Ghistu says that during these days accused used to look vacantly and would only speak to himself. Hathia, the father, says that the accused would sit at one place and would speak to no one. The Assistant Surgeon in the course of his evidence says:

I cannot say what the state of the mind of the accused was before I kept him under observation. It is possible the accused committed the occurrence in a temporary fit of insanity. Such a fit may come all on a sudden and disappear after a short while.

11. This does not help us very much. If it is an open question, a mere possibility that accused may have been insane, the presumption is that he was responsible for his action unless the kind of insanity referred to in Section 84 is affirmatively proved. Neither the Assistant Surgeon nor the Civil Surgeon Dr. G.C. Bhaduri was asked what inference he would draw regarding the state of mind of the accused from such symptoms as sitting down at one place behaving as if he was dumb, not stirring or speaking, or speaking only to himself, and wealing a vacant expression. These are symptoms from which the local witnesses inferred that accuseds state of mind was not normal; and some disturbance of the melancholia type may be a reasonable inference. But for the reasons given above it is clear that the accused was conscious of the nature of his act and as stated in Queen-Empress v. Lakshman Dagdu 10 B 512

If he was conscious of its nature, he must be presumed to have been conscious of its criminality.

12. This distinction is drawn in Mani Ram v. Emperor 8 Lah. 114 : 99 Ind. Cas. 328 : AIR 1927 Lah. 52 : 28 Cri. LJ 120 : 27 PLR 823 : 8 Lah. LJ 566 between paralysis of the will by insane impulses and paralysis of the mind in the sense of being incapable of knowing the nature of the act or that it was wrong or contrary to law. In that case the Judges found: (1) the absence of any motive, (2) the absence of secrecy, (3) multiple murders, (4) want of pre-arrangement, and (5) want of accomplices. These circumstances were in that case held insufficient to support the inference that the accused suffered from unsoundness of mind of the kind referred to in Section 84. The position in the present case is similar.

13. I have dealt with the evidence of accuseds mental condition before and on the day of the occurrence After that date nothing abnormal was observed. He was clearheaded at the time of his confession, He was kept under medical observation by the Assistant Surgeon, Dr. R.K. Bose, who found no signs of insanity. The accused was behaving throughout the period of observation like a normal person. Later on, he was also under special observation of the Civil Surgeon from September 23 onwards. The Civil Surgeon found nothing abnormal about the state of the mind of the accused. I would allow the appeal and convict the respondent Gedka Goala of the charges under Sections 302, 326 and 324, Indian Penal Code. I would sentence him u/s 302, Indian Penal Code to transportation for life, and would pass no separate sentence for the other offences. I would at the same time follow the course taken in Queen-Empress v. Kedar Nasyar Shah 23 C 604 and direct that the case be reported to the Local Government with a recommendation that it may be dealt with u/s 401, Criminal Procedure Code in such a manner as may be judged fit, the accused having committed the murder without any apparent sane motive and while suffering from mental derangement of some sort.

Mohammad Noor, J.

14. I agree.