Admissibility and reliability of dying declaration, necessity of corroboration, sufficiency of evidence to establish guilt.

( 1 ) THE appellant was tried upon a charge of murder by the learned Sessions Judge of Hooghly sitting with a Jury. By " a majority verdict of 8 to 1 the Jury found the appellant guilty under Part I of Section 304, Penal Code. The learned Judge accepted that verdict, convicted the appellant of the relative offence and sentenced him to suffer rigorous imprisonment for 10 years.

( 2 ) THE prosecution case against the appellant was as follows: The appellant was brought up by the deceased Angurbala who was his mother's sister. The deceased also brought up a girl named Kanchanbala. Both the appellant and Kanchanbala grew up as brother and sister and were reared by the deceased as her own children. The deceased possessed a fair amount of landed properties Including a house at Tarakeswar. When Kanchanbala grew up she was married to a man called Karnala Kanta. When the appellant came to age, he too was married, and at the material time he had a wife and children. The only home the appellant had was that of his foster mother Angurbala, whose affairs he looked after. Sometime in 1950 Angurbala executed a Will whereby she devised 4 1/2 bighas of land to Kanchanbala. Shortly before Angurbala came by her death she had promised to make a gift to Kanchanbala of half of the Tarakeswar property. The appellant did not relish the idea of any further gift to Kanchanbala. Indeed, he quarrelled with the deceased over the letter's intention to make the gift. On or about the 12th Falgoon, corresponding to 25-2-1954, Karnala Kanta was summoned by the deceased to her home in Bajitpur, a village within the police Station Tarakeswar. That evening Angurbala went to her lawyer, a gentleman by name E'kkari Mukherjee and made over to him her original Will which she had executed in 1950 with certain Instructions about it. This enraged the appellant. Kamala Kanta stayed on at the deceased's house for the night. The appellant occupied one of the ground floor rooms while the deceased and Kamala Kanta each occupied a room on the first floor. The house was a two storied mud kotha structure. At about 2-30 In the morning of 26-2-1954, the deceased Angurbala came down into the courtyard of her house to answer a call of nature. The appellant came out of his room with a Katari with which he struck the deceased on the head and on other parts of her body. The attack was so serious that the deceased fell down. As she was attacked, she cried out. This roused Kamala Kanta from his sleep. Kamala Kanta on coming out of his room on the first floor saw the appellant striking the woman on the head with a weapon. Kamala Kanta raised an alarm, whereupon the appellant went out of the house by a back door. After the exit of the appellant, Kamala Kanta came down and found the woman lying in a pool of blood, gave her a little water and then went out to obtain help from neighbours. Soon, two neighbours, named respectively Sudhir Mandal and Surendra Nath Chatterjee, appeared on the scene. Others, whose names will be referred to hereafter, also followed. The woman was still alive and she was soon surrounded by these people. Kamala Kanta went out for a doctor and about an hour later a doctor by name Anil Chandra Bagchi arrived. He had her removed to Tarakeswar Hospital for first aid. The woman, on being questioned as to who had assaulted her. mentioned the name of the appellant. In the meantime, at 5 A, M. or thereabout, the appellant turned up at the local thana wearing a 'dhoti' which was stained with blood. There he made a certain statement, whereupon he was taken into custody. As the deceased had several injuries upon her head, some of Which appeared to be fatal, she was sent by a morning train to Walsh Hospital at Serampore. As the deceased's condition was considered to be precarious and there was no time to be lost, the investigating officer could not make any arrangement at Tarakeswar to have a proper dying declaration recorded. But he sent a request to the polic