General Exceptions

A surgeon's knife cuts a patient open, and nobody calls it assault. A man hit by a stranger in a dark lane hits back and breaks the stranger's arm. A seven-year-old picks up a neighbour's phone and walks out with it. On the bare words of the offence sections, all three look like crimes. Yet the law treats them differently. Chapter III of the Sanhita is where the law explains why.

In two minutes

Chapter III of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (ss.14–44) lists the situations in which an act that looks like an offence is not an offence, because of mistake, accident, incapacity, consent, compulsion, triviality or private defence.

The rest of this chapter

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