Parel resident gets 7-year jail for beating wife to death
A Mumbai man received a seven-year sentence for killing his wife after she refused dinner, with the court finding culpable homicide, not murder.
MUMBAI: The sessions court recently sentenced a 43-year-old Parel resident to seven years of imprisonment for beating his wife to death after she refused to eat dinner with him.
The court held convict, Ajay Sukhdev Adsul, guilty of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, observing that the prosecution evidence was not sufficient to prove that his intention was to kill his wife.
The prosecution examined 15 witnesses including a woman police constable, the mother-in-law and two elder children of the deceased woman. The woman constable of Bhoiwada police station had received a call from KEM Hospital that a Parel resident fell in the bathroom and was declared dead before she was admitted to the hospital.
Upon inquiry, the mother-in-law of the deceased woman, who was not present when the incident took place, told the constable that her son beat her daughter-in-law and banged her head on the wall after she refused to eat biryani with him. She also said that her son cleaned up the place after the incident.
Adsul was arrested and prosecuted for murder. The prosecution claimed that the husband accused knew that she could be killed by his actions.
The defence, however, submitted that the accused should be acquitted since there was no evidence to establish the charge of murder against him.
The court observed that the “accused also destroyed the evidence of the offence, and he had reason to believe that he had committed murder of his wife and therefore attempted to disappear the evidence of offence of murder by cleaning the blood stains on the floor by cloth”.
However, it also observed that there was no direct evidence to show that the accused murdered his wife, with the prosecution evidence solely dependent on the last seen theory and circumstantial evidence.
The court held that it was a sudden fight which took place in the heat of the moment and held the accused guilty of culpable homicide not amounting to murder. Hence, it convicted him under section 304 (part-II) and removed the charges of section 302 (punishment for murder) of the Indian Penal Code.