Murder under BNS Section 103

What Section 103 BNS actually says

Section 103 does one job: it fixes the punishment for murder. It does not define murder. That definition lives one section earlier, in Section 101, and the two have to be read together. Section 103 assumes you have already established that a killing is murder; it then tells the court what sentence is available.

The section is split into two sub-sections that deal with two very different situations. Section 103(1) reads: “Whoever commits murder shall be punished with death or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.” That is the general rule, and it is a straight carry-over of Section 302 of the IPC. The court has a choice between two sentences, death or imprisonment for life, and in either case a fine can be added.

Section 103(2) is the genuinely new part: “When a group of five or more persons acting in concert commits murder on the ground of race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief or any other ground each member of such group shall be punished with death or with imprisonment for life or imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than seven years, and shall also be liable to fine.” This is the mob-lynching provision, and it is dealt with in full further down. For now, note the structure: sub-section (1) is the ordinary murder sentence, sub-section (2) is a targeted response to identity-based group killings.

Because Section 103 only supplies the punishment, almost every hard-fought murder trial is really a fight about Section 101 and Section 100, the sections that decide whether the killing counts as murder in the first place. That is where we have to start.

The first question in every case: is it murder or culpable homicide?

The BNS treats unlawful killing as a ladder, not a single offence. At the bottom sits culpable homicide under Section 100. Above it, as a graver species of the same conduct, sits murder under Section 101. The Supreme Court captured the relationship in State of Andhra Pradesh v. Rayavarapu Punnayya (1976) 4 SCC 382, where it held that culpable homicide is the genus and murder is the species: all murder is culpable homicide, but not all culpable homicide is murder. Getting a client from the species down to the genus is often the entire defence.

Section 100 defines culpable homicide as causing death by doing an act with the intention of causing death, or with the intention of causing such bodily injury as is likely to cause death, or with the knowledge that the act is likely to cause death. Section 101 then takes those same building blocks and raises the threshold. A culpable homicide becomes murder when the act is done with the intention of causing death; or with the intention of causing bodily injury that the offender knows to be likely to cause the death of the person harmed; or with the intention of causing bodily injury that is sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death; or with the knowledge that the act is so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death, and the offender has no excuse for running that risk.

The difference between the two sits in the degree of probability. Culpable homicide speaks of injury or an act that is “likely” to cause death. Murder speaks of injury “sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death” and of an act “so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death.” The move from “likely” to “sufficient in the ordinary course of nature” and “must in all probability” is the move from culpable homicide to murder. It is a difference of degree, and courts have long accepted that the line can be fine.

The most quoted test for the third clause of murder comes from Virsa Singh v. State of Punjab, AIR 1958 SC 465, where Justice Vivian Bose broke it into four questions. First, is there a bodily injury present? Second, what is the nature of that injury, proved as a matter of fact? Third, did the accused intend to inflict that particular injury, meaning it was not accidental or unintentional? Fourth, is an injury of that kind sufficient, in the ordinary course of nature, to cause death? If all four are answered against the accused, the offence is murder, and it does not matter that the accused did not intend to kill. The intention the law looks for is the intention to cause the specific injury, not the intention to cause death. That single holding decides a large share of murder appeals.

The five exceptions that pull murder down to culpable homicide

Even where all the ingredients of murder are present, Section 101 contains five exceptions. If any of them applies, the killing is treated as culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and it is punished under Section 105 instead of Section 103. The death penalty falls away, and the sentence drops to life imprisonment or a term of years. These exceptions are the defence’s second line after the intention argument, and they are carried over almost unchanged from the old Section 300.

Exception 1: grave and sudden provocation. Where the accused is deprived of the power of self-control by grave and sudden provocation and kills the person who gave the provocation, the offence is reduced. The classic authority is K.M. Nanavati v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1962 SC 605, where the Supreme Court refused the exception because roughly three hours had passed between the provocation and the killing. That gap gave the accused time to cool and to plan, so the provocation was no longer “sudden,” and the conviction for murder stood. The lesson is that the provocation must be both grave and sudden, and the killing must follow before the passion subsides.

Exception 2: exceeding the right of private defence. Where a person exercising the right of private defence of person or property in good faith exceeds that right and causes death without premeditation and without intending more harm than necessary, the offence is reduced. The defence must be genuine and the excess unplanned.

Exception 3: act of a public servant. Where a public servant, acting in good faith and believing the act to be lawful and necessary for the discharge of duty, exceeds the power given by law and causes death, the offence is reduced.

Exception 4: sudden fight. Where death is caused in a sudden fight in the heat of passion, upon a sudden quarrel, and without the offender taking undue advantage or acting in a cruel or unusual manner, the offence is culpable homicide, not murder. This is one of the most litigated exceptions, because so many killings begin as spontaneous brawls.

Exception 5: consent. Where the person killed is above eighteen years of age and suffers death, or takes the risk of death, with his own consent, the offence is reduced.

Each exception works the same way mechanically: it accepts that a murder was made out, then subtracts the moral aggravation that justifies the murder sentence. That is why they belong to Section 101 and not to some separate defence: they convert Section 103 exposure into Section 105 exposure.

Punishment under Section 103(1): death or imprisonment for life

Once a killing is held to be murder and no exception applies, Section 103(1) gives the court exactly two sentencing options: death, or imprisonment for life. A fine may be added to either. There is no lower tier, no fixed term of years, and no option of a short sentence. This is what marks murder out from almost every other offence in the Code.

Imprisonment for life means imprisonment for the whole of the convict’s remaining natural life, not a fixed period of fourteen or twenty years. The common belief that a life sentence quietly expires after fourteen years is wrong; fourteen years is only the point after which a state government may consider remission under its rules, and even that consideration is discretionary. A convict can, and often does, spend the rest of his life in prison on a life sentence. In some cases, higher courts fix a special term, directing that the convict serve a set number of years, say twenty-five or thirty, before any remission can be considered, as a middle path between an ordinary life sentence and death.

That middle path has limits, and they were clarified in Kiran v. State of Karnataka (2025 INSC 1453). The Supreme Court held that only the constitutional courts, the High Courts and the Supreme Court, can impose a life sentence that runs to the natural end of life or that curtails the normal power of remission. A Court of Session cannot, while convicting under Section 103, direct that the convict must never be released. The trial court’s sentencing power under Section 103 is the ordinary one: life imprisonment or death.

Between the two, imprisonment for life is the rule and death is the exception. That principle is not a matter of judicial mood; it is the settled constitutional position, and it decides how a court reaches a death sentence.

When does murder become a death-penalty case? Rarest of rare, and the 2026 shift

The Supreme Court has never held that murder must attract death. In Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980) 2 SCC 684, a Constitution Bench upheld the constitutional validity of the death penalty but confined it to the “rarest of rare” cases, where the alternative of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed. Death is not the norm for murder; it is reserved for the small class of cases where nothing less will do.

Three years later, Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab (1983) 3 SCC 470 tried to give that phrase some structure. It identified five broad factors that push a case towards the rarest-of-rare category: the manner in which the murder was committed, where it is exceptionally brutal or grotesque; the motive, where it reveals extreme depravity; the anti-social or abhorrent nature of the crime, such as a killing that targets a person because of caste or community; the magnitude of the crime, such as multiple or mass killings; and the personality of the victim, such as an innocent child, a helpless woman, or a public figure killed for performing a public duty. These are not a checklist to be totted up; they are a way of weighing aggravating circumstances against whatever mitigates.

The weighing exercise itself has been tightened. In Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2022), the Supreme Court directed that before choosing a sentence in a capital case, courts should gather real information about the convict, including psychological and psychiatric evaluation, jail-conduct reports, and material on background and the possibility of reform. The Court then took up, in In re: Framing Guidelines Regarding Potential Mitigating Circumstances (2022), the larger question of how and when this mitigating material must be collected, and referred it to a larger bench. That reference is still to be finally answered.

The most recent and most practical development is Aman Singh v. State of Bihar (2026 INSC 424), decided on 27 April 2026. The Supreme Court held that trial courts must call for aggravating and mitigating circumstance reports immediately upon convicting a person of a capital offence, and must hear the sentence separately on that material, rather than pronouncing conviction and death together. High Courts must obtain the same material when they admit a death reference. The Court also directed the National Legal Services Authority to frame standard guidelines for these mitigation inquiries and to ensure that every convict facing a possible death sentence has a dedicated legal team. In practical terms, a death sentence under Section 103 now has to survive a documented, evidence-based sentencing process, or it will not stand on appeal.

Section 103(2): when a mob commits murder

The most important addition in Section 103 is sub-section (2), and it has no equivalent in the old Indian Penal Code. It creates a distinct rule for murder committed by a group of five or more persons acting in concert, where the killing is on a ground such as race, caste or community, sex, place of birth, language, personal belief, or any other similar ground. Each member of such a group is liable to death, or imprisonment for life, or imprisonment for a term of not less than seven years, along with a fine.

Two features of the drafting matter. First, the liability is personal to each member of the group. The provision does not ask which hand struck the fatal blow; every person who was part of the group acting in concert is exposed to the same range of punishment. This tracks the way lynching actually happens, as a collective act in which no single blow can be isolated. Second, the trigger is the identity-based ground. An ordinary group assault that ends in death is prosecuted under Section 103(1) read with the rules on common intention; Section 103(2) is reserved for killings driven by the victim’s race, caste, community, sex, place of birth, language, or belief.

The provision did not appear from nowhere. In Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India (2018) 9 SCC 501, the Supreme Court responded to a wave of mob lynchings by laying down a detailed set of preventive, remedial and punitive directions: nodal officers of senior rank in every district, fast-track trials meant to conclude within six months, victim compensation, and action against those who incite or spread inflammatory material. Crucially, the Court recommended that Parliament consider a separate penal offence for lynching, so that the crime carried its own label and its own punishment. Section 103(2) is the legislative answer to that recommendation.

The provision is also under active judicial watch. In 2025, the Supreme Court directed the Union government to file a status report on the steps taken to implement Section 103(2) and the anti-lynching framework, a reminder that a new offence on the statute book is only as strong as its enforcement on the ground. For anyone advising in this area, the safe reading is that Section 103(2) is fully in force and applies to any qualifying group murder committed on or after 1 July 2024, and that its practical machinery is still being built out.

Section 103 does not stand alone. Three neighbouring sections deal with killings that sit just outside ordinary murder, and a murder brief usually has to keep all three in view.

Section 104: murder by a life-convict. Where a person who is already under a sentence of imprisonment for life commits murder, Section 104 allows the court to impose death, or imprisonment for life, which in this section is spelled out to mean the remainder of that person’s natural life. This is the successor to Section 303 of the IPC, and the change is significant. The old Section 303 made death the only punishment for a life-convict who murdered, and the Supreme Court struck that down in Mithu v. State of Punjab (1983) 2 SCC 277 as a violation of Articles 14 and 21, because it removed all judicial discretion in sentencing. Section 104 restores a workable provision by making death discretionary rather than mandatory: the court may impose it, but it is not forced to, so the constitutional defect that sank Section 303 is not repeated.

Section 105: culpable homicide not amounting to murder. This is the section a successful defence lands on when it defeats the murder charge or establishes an exception. Section 105 has two limbs. Where the act is done with the intention of causing death or of causing bodily injury likely to cause death, the punishment is imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of not less than five years but up to ten years, and a fine. Where the act is done only with the knowledge that it is likely to cause death, but without any intention to cause death or such injury, the punishment is imprisonment of up to ten years and a fine. The intention limb carries a new floor: a minimum of five years, which the old Section 304 did not prescribe. So even the lesser offence now comes with a hard minimum where intention is proved.

Section 106: causing death by negligence. Where a person causes death by a rash or negligent act that does not amount to culpable homicide, Section 106(1) provides for imprisonment of up to five years and a fine. A registered medical practitioner who causes death by a rash or negligent act while performing a medical procedure faces a lower cap of two years and a fine, a concession the old law did not contain. Section 106(2) creates a harsher offence for rash and negligent driving that causes death where the driver escapes without reporting the incident to a police officer or Magistrate, punishable with up to ten years. At the time of writing, Section 106(2) has not been brought into force; its commencement was held back after representations from transport operators, and it should be treated as not yet operational until the government notifies it. Anyone relying on this provision should confirm its current status before acting on it.

Is murder bailable, cognizable and compoundable, and which court tries it?

For an offence of this gravity, the procedural classifications are uniform and severe, and there is no softer version of them.

IPC 302 to BNS 103: what actually changed

If you trained on the Indian Penal Code, the renumbering is the first thing to fix in your memory. The homicide cluster has moved as a block, and the mapping is clean.

Three things are worth internalising about the move from Section 302 to Section 103. First, the definition and the core punishment are carried across intact. Murder is still defined by the four clauses of Section 101, the five exceptions still apply, and the sentence is still death or imprisonment for life. This is why courts continue to rely on decades of IPC-era authority, from Virsa Singh to Bachan Singh to Machhi Singh, when applying the new sections. The substance did not move; the numbers did.

Second, there are three real changes, not just relabelling. Section 103(2) adds the new mob-lynching offence that had no IPC equivalent. Section 104 spells out that “imprisonment for life” for a murdering life-convict means the whole of natural life, and makes the death sentence discretionary rather than mandatory. And Section 105 introduces a five-year minimum in its intention limb, where the old Section 304 Part I had no floor. These are substantive shifts a practitioner has to know, not cosmetic edits.

Frequently asked questions

1. What is the punishment for murder under BNS Section 103?
Under Section 103(1), murder is punishable with death or imprisonment for life, and the offender is also liable to a fine. Imprisonment for life is the rule and death is reserved for the rarest of rare cases. Under Section 103(2), murder committed by a group of five or more persons on an identity-based ground carries death, imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of not less than seven years, along with a fine.

2. Which IPC section does BNS Section 103 replace?
Section 103 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 corresponds to Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. The definition of murder and the core punishment are carried forward, with the addition of the new mob-lynching provision in Section 103(2).

3. What is the difference between murder and culpable homicide under the BNS?
Culpable homicide under Section 100 is the wider offence; murder under Section 101 is its graver form. The difference lies in the degree of intention or knowledge. Where the injury or act is only “likely” to cause death, it is culpable homicide; where it is “sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death” or “so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death,” it is murder. If one of the five exceptions in Section 101 applies, even a murder is reduced to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

4. Is murder a bailable offence under the BNS?
No. Murder under Section 103 is non-bailable, which means bail is at the discretion of the court, not a matter of right. Applications ordinarily go to the Court of Session or the High Court, and for murder they are scrutinised closely.

5. Is murder cognizable? Can the police arrest without a warrant?
Yes. Murder is a cognizable offence, so the police can register an FIR, investigate, and arrest without a warrant or a prior order from a Magistrate.

6. Can a murder case be compounded or settled?
No. Murder is non-compoundable and does not appear in the list of compoundable offences under Section 359 of the BNSS. The family of the deceased cannot settle the case. A High Court may quash proceedings under its inherent power in Section 528 BNSS only in rare and exceptional situations.

7. Which court tries a murder case?
Murder is triable exclusively by a Court of Session. It is committed to the Sessions Court, which conducts the trial and passes sentence, subject to confirmation of any death sentence by the High Court.

8. What is Section 103(2) BNS, the mob-lynching provision?
Section 103(2) punishes murder committed by a group of five or more persons acting in concert on a ground such as race, caste, community, sex, place of birth, language or personal belief. Each member of the group is liable to death, imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of not less than seven years, and a fine. It is a new offence with no equivalent in the old IPC, enacted in response to the Supreme Court’s directions in Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India.

9. When is the death penalty given for murder? What is “rarest of rare”?
The death penalty is reserved for the rarest of rare cases, where imprisonment for life is unquestionably inadequate, a standard laid down in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab and structured in Machhi Singh v. State of Punjab. Following Aman Singh v. State of Bihar (2026), a court must gather aggravating and mitigating material about the convict and hold a separate sentencing hearing before it can impose death.

10. What does “imprisonment for life” mean in a murder case?
Imprisonment for life means imprisonment for the whole of the convict’s remaining natural life, not a fixed term of fourteen years. Fourteen years is only the stage at which remission may be considered under state rules, and such remission is discretionary, not automatic.

11. What is the punishment for murder by a person already serving life imprisonment?
Under Section 104, a person under a sentence of imprisonment for life who commits murder may be sentenced to death or to imprisonment for the remainder of natural life. Unlike the old Section 303, which made death mandatory and was struck down in Mithu v. State of Punjab, Section 104 makes the death sentence discretionary.

12. What is the punishment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder?
Under Section 105, where the act is done with intention, the punishment is imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of not less than five years up to ten years, and a fine. Where the act is done only with knowledge that it is likely to cause death, the punishment is imprisonment of up to ten years and a fine.

13. When did BNS Section 103 come into force?
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 came into force on 1 July 2024 and applies to offences committed on or after that date. A murder committed before then is still tried under Section 302 of the IPC.

14. Can a single blow or a minor-looking act amount to murder?
Yes, it can. What matters is the intention or knowledge behind the act, not the number of blows. As the Supreme Court explained in Pulicherla Nagaraju v. State of Andhra Pradesh, a single blow can be murder where it was aimed to cause an injury sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death, judged from the weapon, the force used, and the part of the body targeted.

References

Legal disclaimer

This article is published for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, and no lawyer-client relationship is created by reading it. Laws and judicial interpretations change over time, and the commencement status of specific provisions, such as Section 106(2) of the BNS, may change after publication. The application of Section 103 BNS to any case turns on its particular facts. For advice on a specific matter, consult a qualified advocate.