The Madras High Court has set aside the conviction and one-year rigorous imprisonment imposed by a lower court on a building owner as well as a construction supervisor, on the charge of having caused death due to negligence, after a mason slipped and fell down from the second floor of the building when it was under construction.
Allowing a revision petition filed by the convicts — Purushothaman and Subramani — Justice V. Bharathidasan held that the duo could not be held responsible for mason Robert’s death which could, at best, be described only as an accident since he had slipped and fallen down at the time of laying concrete.
Stating that the incident had occurred within the MGR Nagar police station limits in June 2010, the judge said that the XXIII metropolitan magistrate at Saidapet had, on March 11, 2014, convicted the petitioners “erroneously without considering the evidence in proper perspective” and the city civil court too had confirmed the conviction in 2015.
According to Mr. Justice Bharathidasan, an offence under Section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the Indian Penal Code would be attracted only if the prosecution could establish that the death of the victim was the result of rash and negligent act of the accused and that such act was a proximate and an effective cause without the intervention of another’s negligence. “The prosecution should also show that there is a proximity between the death of the deceased and the alleged rash and negligent act... But in the instant case, there is no evidence to show that it is because of the negligent act of the revision petitioners that the deceased slipped and fell down from the building.
“While the deceased was working in the second floor, without adequate precautions, he slipped and fell down. Absolutely, there is no proximity between the death of the deceased and the alleged rash and negligent act of the petitioners, and for that, the petitioners cannot be faulted and made criminals,” the judge added.
