Penal Statute-Q17 PDF

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Penal Statute-Q17...

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1) Penal Statute. A penal statute is one which imposes a pecuniary penalty or other punishment for an offence. It provides a penalty for some offence of a public nature. It also provide for penalties for disobedience of the law by the offender by making him liable to imprisonment, fines, forfeiture or even death. If the Statute enforces obedience to the command of the law by punishing the offender and not merely redressing an individual, who may have suffered the statute is penal. According to Lord Esher, the settled rule of construction of penal section is that ‘if there is reasonable interpretation which will avoid the penalty in any particular case we must adopt that construction. If there are two reasonable constructions can be put upon a penal provision, the court must lean toward that construction which exempts the subject from the penalty rather than the one which imposes penalty. There are two elements of crime; the Actus Reus and the mens rea. In Noakes v Dancaster Amalgamated collieries ltd, Maxwell cited that where to apply words literally would defeat the obvious intention of the legislation and produce a wholly unreasonable result. Then the court must do some violence to the words and so achieve that obvious intention and produce a rational construction. But the full bench rejected the argument of futility based on Noakes V Dancaster amalgamated colliery ltd in tolaram’s case. On appeal the Supreme Court held that ‘court is not competent to stretch the meaning of the expression used by the legislature in order to carry out the intention of the legislature’- Mahajan.J . Even if one were to disregard the rule of construction based on futilities the only reasonable way of construction is provided by ensuring that the language is not stretched and rule of strict construction is not violated.

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