Report 202 – Proposal to amend Section 304-B IPC Dowry ... - Jeywin

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CHAPTER-1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Scope of Inquiry
The question that the Law Commission is going to
examine in this Report is whether Section 304B of Indian Penal
Code, 1860, on dowry death, should be amended to provide for
more stringent punishment of death sentence in order to curb
the menace of dowry deaths.
1.2 Earlier Report of the Commission on the subject.
The question of “Dowry Deaths and Law
Reforms” was suo motu taken up earlier by the Law
Commission in its 91 st Report. The existing laws on the subject
may be viewed as the culmination of the Commission’s earlier
efforts in this arena. Generally, where the facts in any incident
of dowry related death, or for that matter any offence, are such
which unambiguously satisfy and prove the legal ingredients of
an offence already known to the law, say, murder in case of
dowry death, the law can be resorted to for bringing the
offender to book in such a case. In this regard the Law
Commission noted in its earlier report referred to above, two
impediments in connection with dowry death cases, namely,
firstly the facts might not fully fit into any known offence; and
secondly,