Cherubin Gregory v. State of Bihar [1964 SC]

This is an appeal by special leave against the judgment of the High Court of Patna dismissing an appeal by the appellant against his conviction and the sentence passed on him by the Sessions Judge, Champaran.

The appellant was charged with an offence under Section 304-A of the Indian Penal Code for causing the death of one Mst. Madilen by contact with an electrically charged naked copper wire which he had fixed up at the back of his house with a view to prevent the entry of intruders into his latrine. The deceased Madilen was an inmate of a house near that of the accused. The wall of the latrine of the house of the deceased had fallen down about a week prior to the day of the occurrence - July 16, 1959, with the result that her latrine had become exposed to public view. Consequently the deceased, among others, started using the latrine of the accused. The accused resented this and made it clear to them that they did not have his permission to use it and protested against their coming there. The oral warnings, however, proved ineffective and it was for this reason that on the facts, as found by the courts below, the accused wanted to make entry into his latrine dangerous to the intruders.

Though some of the facts alleged by the prosecution were disputed by the accused, they are now concluded by the findings of the courts below and are no longer open to challenge and, indeed learned counsel for the appellant did not attempt to controvert them. The facts, as found are that, in order to prevent the ingress of persons like the deceased into his latrine by making such ingress dangerous (1) the accused fixed up a copper wire across, the passage leading up his latrine, (2) that this wire was naked and uninsulated and carried current from the electrical wiring of his house to which it was connected (3) there was no warning that the wire was live, (4) the deceased managed to pass into the latrine without contacting the wire but that as she came out her hand happened to touch it and she got a shock as a result of which she died soon after. On these facts the Courts below held that the accused was guilty of an offence under Section 304-A of the Indian Penal Code. The accused made a suggestion that the deceased had been sufficiently warned and the facts relied on in this connection were two: (1) that at the time of the accident it was past day break and there was therefore enough light, and (2) that an electric light was burning some distance away. But it is manifest that neither of these could constitute warning as the condition of the wire being charged with electric current could not obviously be detected merely by the place being properly lit.

The voltage of the current passing through the naked wire being high enough to be lethal, there could be no dispute that charging it with current of that voltage was a “rash act” done in reckless disregard of the serious consequences to people coming in contact with it.

It might be mentioned that the accused was also charged before the learned Sessions Judge with an offence under Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code but on the finding that the accused had no intention to cause the death of the deceased he was acquitted of that charge.

The principal point of law which appears to have been argued before the learned Judges of the High Court was that the accused had a right of private defence of property and that the death was caused in the course of the exercise of that right. The learned Judges repelled this defence and, in our opinion quite correctly. The right of private defence of property which is set out in Section 97 of the Indian Penal Code is, as that section itself provides, subject to the provisions of Section 99, of the Code. It is obvious that the type of injury caused by the trap laid by the accused cannot be brought within the scope of Section 99, nor of course of Section 103 of the Code. As this defence was not pressed before us with any seriousness it is not necessary to deal with this at more length.

Learned counsel, however, tried to adopt a different approach. The contention was that the deceased was a trespasser and that there was no duty owed by an occupier like the accused towards the trespasser and therefore the latter would have had no cause of action for damages for the injury inflicted and that if the act of the accused was not a tort, it could not also be a crime. There is no substance in this line of argument. In the first place, where we have a Code like the Indian Penal Code which defines with particularity the ingredients of a crime and the defences open to an accused charged with any of the offences there set out we consider that it would not be proper or justifiable to permit the invocation of some Common Law principle outside that Code for the purpose of treating, what on the words of the statute is a crime, into a permissible or other than unlawful act. But that apart, learned counsel is also not right in his submission that the act of the accused as a result of which the deceased suffered injuries resulting in her death was not an actionable wrong. A trespasser is not an outlaw, a caput lupinem. The mere fact that the person entering a land is a trespasser does not entitle the owner or occupier to inflict on him personal injury by direct violence and the same principle would govern the infliction of injury by indirectly doing something on the land the effect of which he must know was likely to cause serious injury to the trespasser. Thus, in England it has been held that one who sets spring-guns to shoot at trespassers is guilty of a tort and that the person injured is entitled to recover. The laying of such a trap, and there is little difference between the spring-gun which was the trap with which the English Courts had to deal and the naked live wire in the present case, is in truth “an arrangement to shoot a man without personally firing a shot”. It is, no doubt, true that the trespasser enters the property at his own risk and the occupier owes no duty to take any reasonable care for his protection, but at the same time the occupier is not entitled to do wilfully acts such as set a trap or set a naked live wire with the deliberate intention of causing harm to trespassers or in reckless disregard of the presence of the trespassers. As we pointed out earlier, the voltage of the current fed into the wire precludes any contention that it was merely a reasonable precaution for the protection of private property. The position as to the obligation of occupiers towards trespassers has been neatly summarised by the Law Reform Committee of the United Kingdom in the following words:

The trespasser enters entirely at his own risk, but the occupier must not set traps designed to do him bodily harm or to do any act calculated to do bodily harm to the trespasser whom he knows to be or who to his knowledge is likely to be on his premises. For example, he must not set man-traps or spring-guns. This is no more than ordinary civilised behaviour.

The appeal fails and is dismissed.