JUDGMENT

Sanderson, C.J. - This is a Reference by the learned Sessions Judge of Birbhum in a case in which the accused Sristidhar Mazumdar was charged with murder and with a minor offence. The accused is a youth, whose age is said to be somewhere between 15 and 17 years.

2. The main allegations on behalf of the prosecution were that the accused and the deceased Umapada were attending a school at Bolpur, that they both lived in the house of a Pleader at Bolpur , that they occupied the same room, that on the morning of the occurrence between 10 and 11 o'clock they were seen preparing themselves for bathing and that later in the day the deceased boy was found by a woman sometime about 2 o'clock lying in an irrigation pit near a tank which was about half a mile away from the place where the boys were lodging--half of his body was covered in the mud--he was wounded and he had apparently lost a considerable amount of blood. It was alleged that he stated that the accused was the person who had inflicted the wounds upon him and that he made that statement in the first instance to the woman, who found him, and then to four men, who were brought by the same woman to the place where the decease