MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Monday came across a case wherein a man was held guilty by the trial court for killing an eatery owner following a quarrel over one rupee.
In March 2009, the accused, Karuppasamy alias Rajendran, went to an eatery owned by Cheettukara Balu alias Balakrishnan of K.C. Patti Village in Dindigul. He gave Rs. 10 for three parottas, each costing Rs. 3. A quarrel erupted when Balu did not return the change of Re. 1, leading to a fight that resulted in the death of the eatery owner.
The trial court in Dindigul awarded life imprisonment to Karuppasamy. Challenging the punishment, the appellant moved the High Court.
Allowing the appeal partly, a Division Bench of Justices S. Nagamuthu and M.V. Muralidaran said: “This is a case where, according to the prosecution, a person lost his precious life on account of a quarrel relating to one rupee. As stated by P.W.1 (son of the deceased) the accused had no previous grudges against the deceased.”
The Bench held that Balu had died only because of the cut injury caused by the appellant with a machete but they refused to believe the sequence of events as described by the police. The judges said the quarrel should have led to fisticuffs between the appellant on one side and the eatery owner and his son on the other side.
It was only during such a fight, the appellant would have sustained injuries and bitten Balu’s son in his chest. Thereafter, he should have used a machete lying nearby to attack Balu. Otherwise, there was no reason as to why he would bite the son of the deceased despite being armed with a machete as projected by the prosecution, the judges said.
Though the police claimed that the accused had sustained injuries only because he was beaten up by the locals after the incident, the judges refused to buy their argument since it was their specific case that he ran away from the place of occurrence, along with the machete, immediately after the incident.
They modified Karuppasamy’s conviction from Section 302 (murder) to 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Indian Penal Code. Further, taking into account that the appellant was 40 years old and he had no bad antecedents, the Bench commuted the life imprisonment to seven years of rigorous imprisonment.
