The Confession

A good deal of skepticism exists among common people about the trustworthiness of confessions made by accused persons before a police officer, or while in police custody and about the methods adopted by the police to extract them from the with whom they have to deal with during the investigation of a crime. The precautions which have been taken by the legislature to secure that confessions and cognate statements amounting to admissions, and qualified confessions made to the police, shall not be considered as admissible evidence in a court of law, unless duly recorded, under the most precise and meticulous regulations, before a judicial magistrate, and the further precautions daily taken by magistrates and judges to see that confessing persons are protected against themselves, and that their statements shall be supported by independent corroboration before they are accepted. This protection to the accused in police custody existed even during the British rule. This, however, did not prohibit or prevent the investigating officers from taking down confessions, or the person in custody, or likely to be in

custody, from making one.

Those false confessions are sometimes made in the hope of purchasing immunity, by men who were entirely innocent, and those confessions, untrue in detail, are made by guilty men, is something which every police officer experiences in his investigating career. Both types of confessions are, however, false. There is all the difference in the world between these two classes of untrustworthy confessions. In the latter case, they are almost invariably retracted when the accused finds that he is not going to receive a pardon, or when a lawyer is employed to conduct the defence. Unfortunately, in the conduct of criminal defences, a point which has once succeeded, and which has established the innocence of an accused man, such as an alibi, an untrue confession, or an attack upon the police, is seized upon by the lawyer as ‘the one hope of his calling’.

The lawyer, and the general public, whose views are shaped by, or adopted wholesale from, those of the lawyer, argue from the particular to the general. One known case is docketed, filed, and carefully put away, to be brought out again and again as occasion demands, for use as a precedent, as though men in their ordinary everyday behaviour, were guided in the same way as a lawyer is guided by precedent on a question of legal principle.

The police have often been proved in the past, and are still sometimes shown, to be guilty of improper conduct in putting pressure upon the accused to confess. It is difficult to discuss an expression, the meaning of which is obscure, but it would be undoubtedly true to say that they are often guilty of what is called 'Third Degree’ methods, and occasionally of ill-treatment which would put ‘Third Degree' methods altogether into the shade. But it would be safe also to say that, if statistics upon the subject were available, it would be found that these methods have been applied in the vast majority of cases to men who have something to confess.

The present story, is deserving of attention, both because it is quite exceptional one, and also because no ‘Third Degree’ methods were employed. This happened in the year 1916 when the first World War was at its raging high. The accused, Chandra Das, was an educated fellow, with a sound knowledge of English, who had had a university education, and was probably one of that much-advertised class of aspirants to clerical employment. His father, ‘the Failed B.A.’, had a shop where Chandra Das worked after finishing his university education, but he aspired for a government job, and had already applied for vacancies as and when they came. His father was a good English scholar and had many acquaintances as well as customers amongst the large English-speaking community in the city of Patna in which he lived.

Chandra Das wrote out his confession at the local police station, after going through quite an intelligible mental process of reasoning, and after weighing arguments which were quite honestly and almost reasonably presented for his consideration. Neither he nor anyone else could accuse the police of having used any physical force for compliance or to get his signature on his confession. There was a touch of humour, grim though it may be, and catastrophic though the incident nearly was, about the way in which it happened. Chandra Das arrived one morning at the Kotwali police station in the city and announced that he had to report the death of his wife, who had hanged herself. He was in an agitated and nervous condition and presented the appearance of someone who had just received a severe shock. The kotwal, or the Station House Officer of the Kotwali police station, was not present in the thana premises at that moment. He was out on important government business and was not expected back for some time.

Chandra had a talk with the muharrir or police clerk or the police writer, a very astute gentleman, well versed in the mentality of criminals and complainants, whose duty it was to enter the reports of those who come to lay information about criminal offenses. There is a muharrir at every police station, even to this day, and he is said to experience great difficulty in writing out and reducing into intelligible, chronological form, the rambling statements which are daily brought to him by the complainants until his palm has been oiled. On this particular occasion, Chandra Das had not got very far with his sad story before the muharrir put down his pen and gave a blank stare at him. Stroking his chin thoughtfully, he shook his head, and said, "The darogha sahib will never believe this".

Now, the darogha, to use the term colloquially applied to the Station House Officer of a police station, in a big city, is a man of great importance and authority. He is generally a man of considerable ability, splendid physique, majestic appearance, and sterling character, who has risen high in his profession by sheer merit. He is continually in touch with the Superintendent of Police, who has a residential bungalow, with a large office and staff, in any big station, as this was, and is universally feared and respected by all classes in the city. He has to deal with many big situations. What he does not know about law, crime, and the affairs of most people in the bazaar is probably thought to be not worth knowing. His opinion with the average man would carry great weight, and especially so with an educated but timid man in difficulty. Chandra Das had done well to come straight to the kotwali though he would have done better to have sought the advice of a male relative or a lawyer, and to have taken him with him, and better still, if he had happened to find the darogha in. Had he done either, this story would probably never have been written. The muharrir could see the resultant of the train of thoughts going through the mind of Chandra Das as he imagined the contact with the incredulous and all powerful darogha. He put his finger on the weak spot.

"The darogha sahib will never believe this." Seeing that he had made an impression, the muharrir went on to enlarge upon the possibilities. The poor Chandra Das would have to be detained in custody. The darogha would have to go and search the premises, have the dead body examined by a doctor, and a post-mortem report made.

He added in a concerned voice," Do you have any witnesses to the act of suicide?".

Poor Chandra Das was already crestfallen. All he could manage was a blank look at the muharrir.

"No? That is very awkward. Cases of strangling an unfaithful wife by a husband - a perfectly justifiable act, is reported almost every month. It is not even a meritorious proceeding," said the muharrir. He waited to let the effect of his words sink in. Then he added, "If it were not for the British rule - it were by no means uncommon, especially if the husband was unhappy, and desired to possess himself of his first wife’s jewelry. It was also quite usual, and even natural, having regard to British justice, for the distracted husband to hang the body on a beam, in order to simulate a case of suicide".

Chandra Das was getting the education of his life. The muharrir continued," But if the darogha's suspicions are aroused, and he finds anything at the house to confirm them, then this might turn into a case of murder - Section 302".

There were reasons, as will be seen, why this last observation, which was probably only a chance shot, went home to the fainting heart of Chandra Das. The muharrir said at the trial that Chandra Das was very pale and agitated while he was at the station. This account of what happened at the interview is taken from the statement which Chandra Das made on the first available occasion, namely, before the committing magistrate. It was substantially denied by the muharrir. They were the only two present at the interview, and it was of course a vital question how far Chandra Das was to be believed about it. He asserted that, on being assured by the muharrir that this story of his wife having committed suicide would never be believed, he asked the muharrir in a helpless sort of way what he had better do.

The muharrir then told him that if he had killed his wife in a fit of passion, or on account of infidelity, he would not be hanged. It would be treated by the Sessions Judge as a case of ‘grave and sudden provocation', and the offence would be reduced to one of ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’. The most that he would get would be ‘transportation for life’, and that as the British forces in Mesopotamia were badly in need of labourers for digging trenches, and other works, the Government of India were organising labour parties to send them there, and were taking men from the jails to make up the required number. All transportation-for-life men were being sent in this way, and if Chandra Das confessed to having killed his wife in a fit of passion on account of her infidelity, he would be so dealt with. He argued that it was quite an attractive proposition and the chance of a lifetime. The men were well fed, and well looked after. They were first trained and then sent down to the coast, and across the sea. He would have a comparatively free life in the open air, in new surroundings, and a new country, which he would otherwise have no chance of seeing.

A large number of prisoners had already gone, and the sarkar had promised them that, on their safe return after the war was over, their sentences would be remitted. There was not much truth in this statement. It is possible that the plan could have been explained to Chandra Das, later on, by his lawyer, or by his father, but the story which Chandra Das told would be an exceptionally ingenious and unlikely one for anyone to have invented. The muharrir, if it was in truth he who originated the idea, was guilty, probably quite honestly, of two serious over-statements. His knowledge of the defence of ‘grave and sudden provocation’ was not so complete as that of the average villager. Cases occur in which the cultivator, returning to his house, finds his wife in the very act of committing adultery with her paramour, and kills one or both of them on the instant.

This would generally occur in the day when the husband is at work in the fields, and the paramour having taken advantage of this, the husband arrives unexpectedly on some pretext or another. But cases more frequently occured in which, although he has good ground for believing that his wife has been unfaithful, the husband does not catch her in the act, but being told by neighbours that such an incident has occurred on a given occasion, loses his patience, and nursing his grief, finally makes a murderous attack on his wife during the night. But in many of these cases, the husband would declare that he found the two together, although it is clear that he could not have done so, and that in a fit of uncontrollable shame and rage, he put an end to them. This commonly told story was due to the very general knowledge which prevailed amongst villagers that the sarkar would take a merciful view of killing if the parties were discovered in the very act, and ‘sudden' provocation be established during the trial.

If Chandra Das had been capable of reflecting at all carefully, he would probably have realised the importance of the difference between the two situations. The mistake was one more likely to have been made by the muharrir. It was a grave error to make in a concocted story. The other over-statement was that prisoners under sentence of transportation for life, or indeed of any transportation, were being taken. Transportation men were not drafted into parties for war efforts. The scheme was carried out with great circumspection, and only prisoners under sentence of ‘rigorous imprisonment’, or hard labour, were taken, and then only those who had not been guilty of acts of violence, and who had served some part of their sentence, and had earned marks for good conduct in jail. But to Chandra Das, the proposal seemed sufficiently attractive. He had arrived at the kotwali in a state of great agitation and had been taken aback and horrified by the muharrir's incredulity. With very little opportunity or capacity for well-balanced reasoning, the suggestion made to him seemed to be the better of two very unpleasant alternatives, and, on the principle of ‘safety first’, to be the best way out of his troubles. So he sat down and wrote out the following confession:

"I am Chandra Das, the son of Mahendra Das. He keeps a book shop and a general shop in the city of Patna. He often visits Calcutta in the course of his business. I was married to my wife five years ago. Her age was then the same as mine. I am now about twenty years of age. I lived with my wife in the city, and worked with my father. She was not strong, and sometimes her health was not good. She did not keep purdah. She was not always obedient. We did not quarrel, but I told her she went out too much. For last few weeks, I found in her box many love-letters. I was very much distressed and shamed, and I spoke to her about it. She got angry and said she would do as she liked. I believe she has been carrying on an intrigue with some man. I am away from home most of the day at my shop. I did not know the name of the man. I asked her who he was, and she did not tell me. I did not speak to anyone about this, but I beat her, and she said she would not see the man again.

Yesterday when I returned home from work, I found a letter. It was a love-letter. It was in the same handwriting as the earlier letters. I got angry and told her she would give me a bad name. I told her I would speak to her parents, and that I would not keep her with me. I told her I would send her back to her parents’ house. In the night, I was very much disturbed and could not sleep. I thought much about my troubles, and I wanted to put an end to my shame and dishonour. I did not know what to do. I had a fever and could not think. I felt mad. Just before sunrise I got up. She was sleeping. I could not bear to see her. I tied a silk scarf round her throat, and put a white cloth over her head. Suddenly she woke up, and opened her eyes. I stuffed one end in her mouth, so that no one should hear her screams. She kicked, and tried to struggle, but she was too weak. She was lying on her back. She did not speak, so I pressed my knee on her chest and tied the scarf tighter round her throat. The struggling stopped and she ceased to breathe. Then she lay quite still, and I saw that she was dead. I became frightened. I did not know what to do.

First I tried to restore her by rubbing. Then I decided to hang the body on a beam in the room. This I did by lifting it on to a table, which I dragged under the beam. Then I put the scarf round the beam. I raised the body and drew the table away and came here to make a report that she had hung herself. She was of bad livelihood, but I was not in my proper senses when I pressed the life out of her."

Chandra Das was put up before a judicial magistrate the same day, and he repeated his confession to be duly recorded. The darogha went to the house, and made a cursory examination. He had the body taken down, and sent it in charge of a constable for the post-mortem examination. It happened, as it happens in so many cases, that the examination and the report were superficial in nature and inadequate for a thorough investigation into the real cause of death. The report seemed to bear out the statements made in the confession. Meanwhile, Chandra Das had communicated with members of his family, who sent a telegram to his father in Calcutta, in the name of Chandra Das, saying that he had confessed to the murder of his wife, and was in custody.

The distracted father came at once. He could not believe such a thing was possible, and immediately sought an interview with his son in jail. He asked him what in the world had induced him to take his wife’s life. He had always seemed such an affectionate husband, and had shown great devotion to her, particularly during her attacks of ill-health. The son then told his father that he had not killed her at all. The father was heartbroken and in tears, but the son seemed to regard the affair with a sort of philosophic indifference.

The father naturally asked how it was that he had been told that Chandra Das had made a confession before a magistrate, and the son then repeated the eventful interview he had had with the muharrir. The father then, without delay, did the right thing. He went to an experienced lawyer and told him the whole grim story, and also informed him that he was in a position to prove that the deceased woman was known in the family to have suicidal tendencies. The lawyer immediately had an interview with Chandra Das, and gave him the excellent advice — an advice rarely given, or if given, rarely acted upon — not to wait for the first hearing during the trial of the criminal case, but to address a communication forthwith to the magistrate setting out the means by which he had been persuaded to confess, and stating that the confession was untrue, and withdrawn, and that his wife had really committed suicide.

Chandra Das was committed to trial, as was almost inevitable after his confession, although some judicial magistrates might have hesitated. His defence had the merit of having been put forward at the earliest possible moment, namely, during the inquiry before the committing magistrate. The prosecution had no evidence to tender beyond the confession and the medical testimony, except two small facts proved by the darogha.

The first was that when he went to the house to see the dead body some cheap glass bangles of the kind commonly worn by women in a humble walk of life, were lying broken on the floor. The second was that the deceased’s jewelry was locked in a box which the accused said was his, and of which he had the key. Some argument was made upon the broken bangles, which were relied upon by the prosecution side.

It was suggested that they must have been broken in the effort made by the husband to lift the body on to the table, or possibly during the operation of strangling and suffocating his wife. The answer to this was that he could hardly have failed to see them if he was a murderer engaged in placing the body so as to simulate suicide, and he certainly would have cleared them away if he had broken them himself before he went to the kotwal to make a false report.

The accused Chandra Das in his statement was absolutely candid about them. He said that the deceased usually wore them, but that he could not say whether they were on her wrists when she went to bed the previous night, and he was quite certain that he had never seen them broken on the floor. This led to the suggestion that they had been broken and left there by the police when they searched the premises in order to afford some foundation for the explanation put forward by the prosecution which, if it was accepted, might be regarded as corroboration of the confession. But the confession was not one which in the eyes of the law required corroboration.

Of course if any doubt were created on the face of it as to its truth, it would be satisfactory for the court to have some independent piece of evidence supporting its general tenor and tending to inspire confidence in it. But it was not one of those confessions which implicated anyone else, or on the strength of which anyone else could have been implicated in a charge. It concerned and implicated only the accused himself. On the other hand, it was not one of those cases in which the confession, if untrue in any of its details, was yet likely to be true in substance. A man confessing to a crime in which others have taken part will often insert untrue details in order to minimise his own share and to emphasise the share of others; or he may deliberately in order to work off old grudges, or in order to placate the police, falsely introduce the names of persons who were not there. And therefore it may justly be said about it that unless the court was satisfied of its truth in its entirety it ought not to accept it as true in any degree at all.

This is not suggested as a principle of law, nor as a rule of universal application, but as a sound working principle of plain common sense. If the man were really making a true confession of a simple crime of which he alone could have been guilty, there would be no inducement to him to embellish or qualify the actual facts or to introduce statements based solely on imagination which could be of no service to him. There would be no adequate motive for inventing anything. Or to put it in another way if you are going to act in convicting a man of a crime on the sole evidence of his carefully considered statement, you ought to be satisfied that the statement is absolutely true. It is difficult to find any justification for rejecting part of it as untrue, and at the same time, in spite of such rejection, accepting another part of it as true. But all the questions arising from the discovery of the broken bangles were purely speculative and no inference could safely be drawn from it one way or the other. The answer made by the defence

To the second point relied upon, namely, that the accused had taken possession of his wife’s jewelry may be dealt with later on, when the substantial defence of Chandra Das was examined. The superficial nature of the postmortem and report did not help either side – neither the prosecution nor the defence. There was nothing in the whole of the medical tag evidence which would enable one to decide with confidence whether the cause of death was hanging, strangulation, suffocation, or a combination of these causes. Nor was there anything inconsistent with hanging. It is often a difficult question to decide, even when all the data have been accurately recorded.

Unfortunately, the evidence was silent, because the report was silent, up in several points with which it ought to have dealt if it had been thoroughly made, and which became of the greatest importance in the light of the controversy which was raised at the trial. It must be conceded that the doctor who made the examination, and who subsequently gave evidence at the trial, had been told that the husband had confessed to having suffocated the deceased, and that neither the possibility of suicide or hanging crossed his mind. He was therefore unable in his evidence to add very much to what he had said in his report. All that he could do was to answer abstract questions as an expert about the usual symptoms which are seen in either case.

These symptoms will now be proper to discuss. The presumption is of course greatly in favour of suicide in a clear case of hanging. One of the first symptoms to be examined should be the mark on the neck. If this is clearly defined, it will in the case of suffocation usually be transverse in direction, low down on the neck and completely encircling it, whereas in the case of hanging it will be higher up and oblique in direction.

When the victim is suffocated by pressure of the hands on the throat, marks of the fingers will almost certainly be left on the skin. There was nothing of that sort in this case. A common method of suffocation is to insert a lathi, or thick stick, in the cloth bound round the neck and to twist the cloth tighter and tighter, using the stick as a lever. This produces a central bruise or other similar injury. The use of a soft ligature would not leave a mark. The position of the body in relation to the head is important. In hanging, the head is bent in the direction in which the combined action of gravity and suspension would carry it and is stiffened in that position. If the head is found hanging over in that position, it shows that the hanging took place before rigor mortis set in. No special observation had been made on this matter, as the body had been taken down at once by the darogha’s orders and he had made no notes about it. But the doctor had noticed that some saliva had run from the mouth and that both the eyes and the tongue were protruding, the latter having been slightly bitten between the teeth.

Both these appearances are common indications in death by hanging, and the running of the saliva is said to be not likely to be present in strangulation. In a case of hanging it is usual to find the hands firmly clenched, and one would have expected it in this case if the woman had really hanged herself, but nothing was noted about this one way or the other. Suffocation has been described in Taylor, the standard work on medical jurisprudence, as that condition in which air is prevented from entering the lungs, not by constriction of the windpipe, but by some mechanical cause operating externally by pressure on the chest, or by blocking the mouth and nostrils; or internally, by closing the throat, windpipe, and air passages. In hanging, asphyxia takes place in consequence of the suspension of the body. In strangulation, asphyxia may be induced not only by the constriction produced by the ligature, but by the application of pressure on the windpipe.

It is also said that the indications are so variable and appearances so resemble death by disease that a well-informed medical man cannot always detect death by suffocation simply by an examination of the body without any knowledge of collateral circumstances.

If there were any truth in the confession which Chandra Das made, death must have been caused either by strangulation or by suffocation, or by a combination of the two; and it would presumably have been difficult in any case to say which. But if the case of the prosecution were true there should have been no appearances of death by hanging.

And one could only say upon a review of the whole medical and expert testimony that the prosecution failed to establish either the affirmative of the one alternative or the negative of the other. The first fact relied upon by the defence, and conclusively established, was that the deceased woman was illiterate. Not only had she always made her thumb-mark when she had to sign anything, but she was shown by the evidence of her family and of people who knew her, to be unable to read or write. No letters of the kind mentioned by the husband in his confession were found or could be proved to have existed, and the accused stated that the story which he had told of his wife's intrigue and clandestine correspondence was pure invention. The next fact was that the deceased had been medically treated for a long while back for hysteria, and that she had twice tried to commit suicide. On one occasion when she had been in weak health, and was excitable, she made a quite determined effort, according to those who helped to save her, to put an end to herself by drowning when she was bathing in the sacred river for the good of her soul. On another occasion she had taken poison and was taken ill. The fact that she had taken it voluntarily depended on the statement of her husband, but he had called in a doctor to attend to her and had made the same statement to him at the time.

Chandra's wife also suffered from a form of religious hysteria, and had, according to the evidence of the members of both families, developed the remarkable habit of continually washing herself, and not merely washing, but sousing and swilling herself, with water at odd hours of the day. She had frequently refused food, and had at times been reduced to a state of considerable weakness. Her health and general conduct had been a source of great anxiety to her husband and to his father. Three doctors in all were called in, belonging, no doubt, to the same community as the husband, and not men of high standing in their profession, who said that they had treated her on different occasions and found her suffering from an aggravated form of hysteria, which was not unlikely, in their view, to result in suicidal tendencies. One of her peculiarities when she got excited, according to the accused, was to throw away portions of the small collection of jewelry which she possessed, and this had led him to take it from her and to lock it up in order to prevent her from wearing anything but a few glass bangles on each arm and some other ornaments of trivial value.

Another fact relied upon rather strongly by the defence was a singular one. It appeared from the medical evidence that the big toe of the left foot of the deceased had been slit with some sharp instrument, and that the wound was probably post-mortem. No one could have inflicted this except the accused, and he admitted that he had done it. The prosecution seemed to be unable to make anything of it. The accused, however, stated that when he first found his wife hanging, he had a latent hope that her life might not be extinct. He had contemplated trying to take the body down, but did not know how to set about it, and feared that if he changed the position he might be suspected of having caused or contributed to her death. It had not been long before he realised that she was dead. But in order to make sure he fetched a knife and cut her toe, which was the nearest and simplest thing to test, to see if the wound drew blood.

He had heard of such tests being made, and it was recognised at the hearing that it was a test not infrequently practised. When no blood flowed, he knew that the case was hopeless. He added that he had intended to report this to the police when he went to the kotwal, and would have done so if he had not been persuaded to alter his entire story. It was contended by the defence, with some show of reason, that as this act must have been done by the accused, it was a strong argument against the credibility of the confession, for if he had really strangled and suffocated his wife and knelt upon her chest until, to use his own graphic language, ‘the life had been pressed out of her’, the cutting of the toe to see if life was extinct was entirely superfluous. It was an act which might be done by anyone who hoped that it was not yet too late to save the life; it could hardly have been done by a man who wanted to take the life away.

The jury who sat with the judge at Sessions were of the opinion that the accused man was not guilty. This was not a point to which much weight could be attached, as the case was of a kind in which they were not unlikely to take that view. But the Sessions Judge convicted, and sentenced Chandra Das to death by hanging. He believed the confession was true. He was unable to accept the story of the muharrir's intervention. He thought that, even if the wife was illiterate, she might easily have received and sent letters through a female friend; though as to this, it was observed in the judgement that the deceased would be unlikely to keep the love letters in her own possession when she could not read them and the husband might find them. He was inclined to think that the family and medical evidence for the defence was exaggerated in the interests of the accused, but that even if the wife had had suicidal tendencies and had suffered from hysteria, this was not inconsistent with her husband desiring to take her life, and it might have been his dominant motive.

This verdict was reversed on appeal by the High Court, who took the view that the confession was definitely shown to be untrue and that the explanation given by the accused must be taken to be a true one. The appellate court considered the advisability of asking for further medical evidence but decided eventually that in the absence of certain material facts, no expert could do more than give theoretical evidence, and that no additional evidence as to the appearance of the corpse was obtainable. Although men condemned to death by a single judge bench are not infrequently acquitted by a court of two-judges on appeal, the case of Chandra Das presents a striking example of a trial for murder, in which the accused, mainly on his own confession, was found guilty in a reasoned judgment by a single judge, and in which the appellate court, not treating the death of the deceased as a mystery, nor giving the accused the mere benefit of a doubt, were of opinion that the circumstances established the man’s innocence.