Woman who killed a child let off over ‘insanity’ due to PMS
JAIPUR: The Rajasthan high court, earlier this month, acquitted a woman accused of murdering a child more than three decades ago on the grounds that she was suffering from insanity triggered by premenstrual syndrome (PMS) at the time.
The bench, in a judgment delivered on August 1, stressed on the fact that three doctors spoke in favour of Kumari Chandra, a resident of Nasirabad in the state’s Ajmer district.
“In the present case, not one but three doctors who treated her on different occasions deposed in favour of such a plea of insanity set up by the defence,” a copy of the court judgment, accessed by HT on Monday, reads.
Chandra was accused of pushing three children, two boys and a girl, into a well in August 1981.
One of the boys and the girl were saved by people who witnessed the incident but the other boy drowned.
“Although the law has not developed in India as to the premenstrual stress syndrome (PMS) being set up as the defence of insanity, yet the accused has a right to plead and probabilise such a defence to show that she was suffering from ‘premenstrual stress syndrome’ when the crime was committed and because of her such condition, the offence that she committed was an involuntary act on her part,” states the judgment.
A trial court in Ajmer had convicted Chandra in January 1987 under sections 302 (punishment for murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 374 (unlawful compulsory labour) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and ordered her to undergo life imprisonment and pay a fine of ₹100.
The bench, in its judgment, quoted extensively from research papers and reports by international experts including one by Dr Patricia Easteal, senior criminologist, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra and also referred to an article on PMS published in the Duke Law Journal and a paper by Catherine Dolton, an international authority on the syndrome.
PMS is a condition that affects a woman’s emotional and physical health, and her behaviour during certain days of the menstrual cycle, generally just before her periods.