The central legal point established in the judgment is the assessment of the accused's knowledge of the probable consequences of her actions and the nature of the injuries inflicted, leading to the alteration of the conviction from murder to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

Davies, J.

1. Upon the further evidence given by the District Medical Officer, Dr. Lancaster, who was present at the post mortem, we have no reason to doubt that the death of Kalan was due to the injuries done to his testicles, and not to disease or other cause. And the evidence, as well as the admissions of his wife, Kaliyani, the prisoner, make it clear that it was she who caused those injuries by squeezing the testicles with her hand.

2. But in convicting her of murder and sentencing her to death, the Sessions Judge has not sufficiently taken into consideration whether the woman could have been aware that her act would in all probability lead to a fatal result, and so intended it.

3. The gripping and squeezing of the testicles is well known to be a very common form of assault in this country among the lower classes of the people, but in a lengthened experience of twenty-seven years as a Magistrate and Judge, I have never heard until now of a single case in which that particular form of assault, unattended by other violence, has proved fatal. And in the various works on Medical Jurisprudence that I have consulted, I have been able to find only one reported case of the kind. The case of Moobrack in 1845 (vide page 479 of Chevers medical Jurisprudence). How then can we rightly attribute to this woman a knowledge that by her act--one so frequently committed among people of her class without ill effects--she would cause death or even be likely to cause it? In my opinion, it is impossible to hold her responsible for so unforeseen a result, and I would acquit her altogether of any charge of culpable homicide.

4. The next question is whether she ought to be found guilty of causing hurt or grievous hart. The only kind of grievous hurt that she might have intended to cause was emasculation, but that, like causing death is not shown to be at all a probable result of squeezing the testes merely by the hand, and therefore it cannot be taken that she contemplated it.

5. The fact is that she and her husband were having a fight, in the course of which she attacked him in the way stated. That has been her account from the beginning, and here again it seems to me the Sessions Judge has done her scant justice in not giving some weight to the provocation she undoubtedly received. Her husband was ill and was trouble some in consequence. She tried to keep him quiet by pushing him down. He bit the little finger of her right hand, and they fell together by a raggi stone where a knife lay. Her husband seized this knife and made a dash at her throat with it. She then proceeded to maul him in the way described while he tore at her hair, and it was in this encounter that they were seen by the two eye-witnesses and separated. The rest of the womans story is well corroborated by the eyewitnesses and the medical evidence. The second witness, Aaron, admits that the woman complained to him that her thumb (it really was the little finger) had been bitten, and, though he professes to have seen no marks of the bite, the Hospital Assistant did find marks on her little finger which he says may have been caused by a bite. The third witness, Karuppan, further states that the woman told him that her husband had cut her with a knife on the throat and that he saw a slight mark there which was bleeding--and the Hospital Assistant, who saw this mark also, says it may have been inflicted with a knife. There was, in fact, a knife lying at the spot, which the prisoner at once pointed out as the knife that had been used. Though the Hospital Assistant is of opinion that the wound on the neck was self-inflicted, because it was fine, his opinion is entitled to no weight in the face of the fact, that the wound was seen in existence by the third witness at the termination of the fight before there was time for concoction, and after the fight the woman was kept under guard and had no opportunity to cause the wound without being detected. So that I am satisfied that the woman