Criminal Law

Emperor v. Mushnooru Suryanarayana Murthy

(1912) 22 MLJ 333

Facts

The accused intended to kill a particular man, Appala Narasimhulu.
His motive was connected with obtaining a financial benefit under an insurance arrangement.
To carry out the plan, he mixed poison into sweetened food or halwa and offered it to the intended victim.
The intended victim ate only a small portion.
He disliked the food and discarded or left the remaining portion.
Two children later came across the poisoned food and ate it.
The accused had no personal quarrel with the children and had not specifically intended to harm them.
The poison caused the children’s deaths, while the originally intended victim survived.
The accused argued that he could not be convicted of murdering the children because he had intended to kill a different person.

Whether an accused who intends to kill one person but causes the death of another is guilty of murder.
Whether the absence of specific intention toward the actual victims prevented liability under the law of homicide.
Whether the children’s act of eating the poisoned food broke the chain of causation.

Section 301 IPC embodies the doctrine commonly described as transferred malice or transmigration of intention.
Where a person:
intends or knows that an act is likely to cause the death of one person; but
causes the death of another person, the offence is determined as though the intended person had died.
The accused’s murderous intention attaches to the prohibited consequence of causing human death.
A mistake concerning the identity of the victim does not remove the guilty intention.
Causation remains established where the death is the natural and sufficiently direct consequence of the accused’s deliberate act.

The accused deliberately prepared food containing poison.
This was not an accidental contamination or negligent handling of a dangerous substance.
His purpose was to cause death.
Had Appala Narasimhulu died after eating the food, the accused would plainly have been guilty of murder.
The fact that the intended victim ate only a small amount did not alter the nature of the accused’s original act or intention.
The children died from the very poison that the accused had intentionally placed in the food.
Their deaths were therefore caused by the lethal instrument created and set in motion by him.
The law did not require proof that he:
knew the children;
wished them dead;
predicted that those particular children would eat the food.
His error concerned only the identity of the persons killed.
Section 301 prevented him from escaping murder liability merely because his criminal design struck unintended victims.
The children’s consumption of the food did not transform the poisoning into an unrelated event.
The accused had intentionally introduced a lethal substance into food meant for human consumption.
The resulting deaths fell within the danger he deliberately created.
The Court therefore transferred the intention to kill the original target to the actual deaths caused.
This is different from a case where an entirely independent and unforeseeable event becomes the true cause of death.
Here, poison caused precisely the kind of harm for which it had been administered.

The Court held the accused criminally liable for the children’s deaths.
His intention to kill Appala Narasimhulu was transferred to the actual victims under Section 301 IPC.
It was immaterial that the persons who died were not the persons whom he intended to kill.
The deaths were sufficiently caused by his deliberate poisoning of the food.
Use this case for: where the accused intends to kill one person but accidentally kills another, the murderous intention transfers to the actual victim.