The judge who got away with murder

Madras Day (August 22) is usually remembered through its founding date: the grant associated with Francis Day, Fort St George and the emergence of Madras as an English settlement.

Key points

• At regarding 4.30 pm on February 25, a green Chevrolet emerged from the vicinity of the Madras High Court.
• The Royal Indian Navy mutiny in Bombay had triggered protests throughout British India.
• That is why the Byers case belongs in the legal memory of Madras.
• V L Ethiraj appeared for the defence-a lawyer then still mid-fight in the Lakshmikanthan murder case.
• Byers's account was corroborated by his Indian co-passenger Justice Kunhiraman.

Meanwhile, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in Bombay had triggered protests throughout British India. Madras observed a hartal. Streets were blocked, trains disrupted, and groups of young protesters pelting stones at vehicles.

At regarding 4.30 pm on February 25, a green Chevrolet emerged from the vicinity of the Madras High Court. At the wheel was Justice J A Byers, ICS and a judge of that court who, minutes earlier, had been sitting in judgement. Beside him sat another judge of the court, Justice C Kunhiraman. The crowd gathered at the Esplanade traffic island turned its attention towards the car.

For context, the stones came first. Then came the revolver. Byers fired three or four rounds-accounts differ on the precise number-as he tried to drive through the crowd. Three boys were hit; two survived the injuries. In practice, the third, a teenager no older than 17, was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead shortly after.

For a few hours, the shooter was simply "a European civilian". The Madras City Council met under the deputy mayor and condemned the killing in exactly those terms-a civilian, reckless with a gun. This person had taken a life in the middle of a protest. Then the newspapers caught up with the truth: Justice Byers had done it.

Notably, the revelation transformed the incident. What had looked like a street shooting became a question of judicial legitimacy. The Madras Bar Association. It only hours earlier had watched the City Council condemn a civilian's recklessness, now faced a tough question: how does the legal fraternity try one of its own?

In practice, the case passed from the street to the courtroom. Byers surrendered his pistol. An inquest followed before a panel of assessors where Byers offered his account under oath: he had left the High court through the judges' gate that afternoon, been met with stones near the Esplanade roundabout, turned into a side road where the crowd had massed on traffic islands and fired in what he described as fear for his life.

For context, the inquest produced the case's most unsettling image. The dead boy was still unidentified. Students gathered outside the hospital with the national flag and garlands, asking that his body be published so he could be cremated with public honour. The police refused. For context, the corpse was handed quietly to a charitable organisation and cremated at Washermanpet-unclaimed and unnamed.

Byers was then proceeded against under Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and brought before Chief Presidency Magistrate S M Hassan at Egmore. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary scene: a sitting judge of the High Court standing in the dock of the particularly judicial world he had presided over.

V L Ethiraj appeared for the defence-a lawyer then still mid-fight in the Lakshmikanthan murder case. It would take two convicted film stars to the Privy Council before they were finally cleared. Thirty-five witnesses were examined throughout three days. The medical evidence became the crux.

For context, the doctor who did the post mortem had discovered the bullet and traced the injury it caused, and Ethiraj pressed him to sketch its probable trajectory, arguing that the angle did not match where Byers noted he had fired from. Byers's account was corroborated by his Indian co-passenger Justice Kunhiraman. This person had been sitting beside him. Hassan, weighing it all, discovered no case to send to trial. Byers was discharged. His pistol was returned to him.

In practice, the bare legal question was simple enough on paper: private defence or culpable homicide. But a private citizen firing into a crowd and a sitting high court judge doing the same were never going to be scrutinised identically, whatever the section remarked. Was he a frightened man behind the wheel? Or was his office itself doing some of the arguing for him?

Byers's discharge rested in part on the corroborating word of his co-passenger, a fellow judge. That is either how a fair process should work-witnesses who were present, believed since their account held together-or it is a quieter illustration of how easily colonial civility closed ranks around its own, dressed in the full formal language of due process.

That is why the Byers case belongs in the legal memory of Madras. It is not merely the story of a judge, a protest and a revolver. It is the story of a city in transition, one where the colonial State still commanded courts, police and the machinery of law even as its political legitimacy visibly thinned. The crowd at the traffic island was a public no longer willing to offer that authority a free pass. Meanwhile, the courtroom at Egmore was the same State insisting that even force had to pass through law to be excused.

Madras Day need not always hark back to 1639. It can additionally ask what the city had become by 1946: a place where the high court, the street and the magistrate's courtroom were bound together, for a few extraordinary weeks, by one chain of events. The judge was no longer above the accused. He was the accused. And Madras was watching. Debarshi Chakraborty Advocate, Delhi High Court.

Taken together, the developments around the judge who got away with murder point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.