Apex court for caution in suicide abetment cases

NEW DELHI - The Supreme Court has said that an individual cannot be accused of abetting a suicide unless there is a “positive act on the part of the accused to instigate or aid (another) in committing suicide”.

“Abetment involves a mental process of instigating a person or intentionally aiding a person” in committing suicide, said an apex court bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan in a judgment.

The court said this while setting aside charges of abetment to suicide against S.S. Cheema, security officer of the Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU), Amritsar.

Cheema had retired as an Indian Police Service officer before joining GNDU. Cheema was charged of driving a student, Saurav Mahajan, to suicide.

Mahajan, a final year law student at GNDU, committed suicide by jumping before a train. He was accused by a fellow classmate of stealing a mobile phone.

Abetment to suicide attracts a maximum sentence of 10 years.

While quashing the charges against Cheema, the judgment, delivered Aug 12, said that for the conviction of a person for abetment to suicide there had to be a clear “mens rea” (criminal intention or knowledge that an act is wrong) to commit the offence.

Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Bhandari said that the offence under provisions of abetment to suicide also requires “an active or direct act which led the deceased to commit suicide seeing no other option”.

Besides this, the judgment said that the act of the accused “must have been intended to push the deceased into such a position that he committed suicide”.

Referring to an earlier judgment of the court, the bench said that the (trial) court should be extremely careful in assessing the fact and circumstances of the each case and the evidence whether the cruelty meted out to the victim had in fact induced him or her to commit suicide.

The court said that if a person who has committed suicide was hypersensitive to “ordinary petulance, discord and differences in the domestic life quite common to the society (then) the conscience of the court should not be satisfied for basing a finding that the accused charged of abetting the offence of suicide should be found guilty”.

In the instant case, the judgment said that no conviction against Cheema would hold without any credible evidence or material on record against him.

The order of framing a charge for abetment to suicide against Cheema is “palpably erroneous and unsustainable”, the judgment said.