Cherubin Gregory Vs The State Of Bihar AIR 1964 SC 205

Hon'ble Supreme Court of India observed as " The appellant was charged with an offence under S. 304A of the Indian Penal Code for causing the death of one Mst. Madilen by contact with an electrically charged naked copper wire which he had fixed up at the back of his house with a view to prevent the entry of intruders into his latrine.....
an electric light was burning some distance away. But it is manifest that neither of these could constitute warning as the conditions of the wire being charged with electric current could not obviously be de- tected merely by the place being properly lit.....
The right of private defence of property which is set out in s. 97 of the Indian Penal Code is, as that section itself provides, subject to the provisions of s. 99 of the Code. It is obvious that the type of injury caused by the trap laid by the accused cannot be brought within the scope of s. 99, nor of course of s. 103 of the Code....
The contention was that the deceased was a trespasser and that there was no duty owed by an occupier like the accused towards the trespasser and therefore the latter would have had no cause of action for damages for the injury inflicted and that if the act of the accused was not a tort, it could not also be a crime. There is no substance in this line of argument. In the first place, where we have a Code like the Indian Penal Code which defines with particularity the ingredients of a crime and the defences open to an accused charged with any of the offences there set out we consider that it would not be proper or justifiable to permit the invocation of some Common Law principle outside that Code for the purpose of treating what on the words of the statute is a crime into a permissible or other than unlawful act. But that apart, learned Counsel is also not right in his submission that the act of the accused as a result of which the deceased suffered injuries resulting in her death was not an actionable wrong. A trespasser is not an outlaw, a Caput lupinem. The mere fact that the person entering a land is a trespasser does not entitle the owner or occupier to inflict on him personal in- jury by direct violence and the same principle would 203 govern the infliction of injury by indirectly doing some- thing on the land the effect of which he must know was likely to cause serious injury to the trespasser."