020. DEFENCE WOUNDS

I have received a very good response for the article " Death due to accidents" published in the September 1994 issue of C&D. Letters were received from all over the country and some even from foreign lands. Mr. Sanjiv Gupta, an NRI from Perth, Australia writes," I received the cuttings of your article through a friend in Bombay, and was quite impressed by reading it. I was particularly impressed by the way you deduced whether Sohan was walking or lying on the ground when he was hit by the car. Keep the good work up. Please give us something on aircraft accidents too." Thanks, Sanjiv. I am pleased you liked my article. As for the aircraft accidents I promise to give an article very soon.

Mr. Ravindra Saxena from Hari Nagar, New Delhi wants to know if we can know the speed of the vehicle too, by doing the post-mortem of the person killed by it. Sorry, Ravindra. The only thing about speed that I can tell by doing post-mortem is whether the vehicle was going fast or slow. Nothing more than that! If the vehicle was going at a very fast pace, there would be drag marks over the body. We call them graze abrasions in technical language. If the body did not reveal any significant drag marks, I would be tempted to say that the vehicle was moving at a slow pace, perhaps less than 40 km/hour. But I can not be much more accurate than this. For instance, I can not say ( by merely doing the post-mortem) that the vehicle was going at a speed of, say, 56 km/hour. Yes! there is a way of saying this; but not by post-mortem. It is by looking at the brake marks over the road. This is a long topic and certainly you have given me a good topic to work one of my next articles on. I promise to tackle this issue in one of my next articles. Meanwhile if any reader can suggest me the ways to deduce the speed of the vehicle by doing only the post-mortem, please feel free to write to me, and I promise to include it in my next feedback column.

This time I am going to tell you about the so-called Defence wounds. These are the wounds sustained by a person, when he is defending himself from the attackers. For instance, if an attacker is coming towards his victim with a knife, and the victim is aware of this, he will attempt to stop him in several ways. One of the ways is to catch the knife with his bare hands. The attacker then tries to free the knife from the grip of the victim. This produces deep gashes on the palms of the victim. During the post-mortem examination when I see these types of injuries on the victim, I can make some conclusions immediately. It tells me that the victim was conscious of the attack on him and he was not taken unawares. This question is of vital medico-legal importance in several cases. Another important thing that these wounds tell me is that the death was not suicidal. In suicidal deaths, there is no question of sustaining defence wounds.

Defence wounds are mostly seen on the upper limbs, because these are the body parts with which a defendant tries to defend himself. The wounds are mainly cuts and gashes, when the attacking weapon is a sharp-edged weapon such as a dagger or knife. If the attacking weapon was a blunt edged weapon such as an iron rod or some such similar weapon, then the injuries can take the shape of bruises too. These injuries need not necessarily be on upper limbs only. If the victim tries to defend himself when he is lying on the ground, he may try to use his legs to ward off blows etc. In such cases, the injuries may be on thighs, knees and shins. One of the best examples of such injuries is that seen in attempted rape, when the victim tries to save her genitals from attack by her thighs. Many defence injuries are seen on the inside of thighs in such cases.

On 29 November last year, an interesting case was brought to me, in which the presence of defence injuries proved vital in solving the case. One Ramlal was found dead in his room with his neck slashed. He was a 50 year old rich man who lived with his wife and a 27-year old son, Mohan. Mohan was a bad characterized guy and had an eye on his father's money right from the beginning. There had been too many fights in the household over the money. When Mohan got married, Ramlal's troubles increased because his wife was in no way better than Mohan. In fact, she used to instigate Mohan to get his father's money by any means whatsoever. One night, Mohan driven by greed, decided to do the ultimate. He took a knife and went to his father's room. As soon as he entered the room, Ramlal woke up and tried to save himself from Mohan's knife. In the process his right palm received two deep gashes which did not come to the notice of Mohan. Even if Mohan had noticed those cuts, there is hardly anything he could have done about them. The chances were that he would not even have understood their significance, let alone do something about hiding them. When the body was found the next day, Mohan could convince everyone-even the police- that it was a case of suicide. He had planted the knife in the hands of the dead body and it appeared to everyone that Ramlal had put an end to his life. It was understandable because Ramlal had become very tired of his life. There were too many fights going on in the household. When I received the dead body from the police, the story that was given to me was that it was a case of suicide, and if I could add further light to the case. So much was the conviction of the police that it was a case of suicide!

When I made a preliminary examination of the dead body, I found those gashes in the palms of Ramlal's dead body. This immediately told me that I was dealing with a case of murder and not of suicide. I called the police and told them the whole story. The police could not believe my version. But when Mohan was questioned under the weight of forensic evidence, he cracked and admitted his guilt. This was a victory of forensic science. Mohan got the life imprisonment for his ghastly deed. Were it not for those two tell-tale defence wounds on the palms of Ramlal's dead body, Mohan would have been a free man today.

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