LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2025-26 - Set 2 Question Paper with Solutions

Crime is not simply conduct that is immoral, and two decisions prove the point rather than illustrate it. In Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39, a petitioner challenged section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, which punished a man who had intercourse with the wife of another man without that man's consent, while exempting the woman from punishment altogether and giving her no complaint of her own. A Constitution Bench struck the section down, holding that it treated the wife as the property of her husband, that consent of the husband could not determine criminality, and that the provision offended Articles 14, 15 and 21; adultery remains a ground for divorce and is no longer an offence. In Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1, five judges read down section 377 so far as it criminalised consensual sexual acts between adults in private, holding that the provision violated Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21 and that the identity it targeted is protected by the constitutional right to privacy.

Neither the morality nor the conduct changed on the day of either judgment. What changed was the legal category, which is precisely why a substantive definition of crime built on immorality cannot stand: the same act was a crime on one day and not on the next, and no fact about the act accounts for the difference.

Two Indian points complete the concept. Article 20(1) of the Constitution embodies the requirement that the prohibition exist before the act, so nothing can become a crime retrospectively. And the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, has added offences that did not exist in the Penal Code of 1860, including organised crime, petty organised crime, terrorist act and snatching, which shows the category being extended by legislation in response to changed conditions.

Crime, criminal law and criminology distinguished

Criminal law supplies criminology with its boundaries and takes from it three things. The facts on which policy rests, since a legislature considering whether to raise a sentence needs to know whether severity deters, and the evidence says that certainty does and severity does not. The instruments of individualisation, from the probation officer's report under section 4 of the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958 and the preliminary assessment under section 15 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 to the psychiatric, psychological, social history and jail conduct reports which Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2023) 2 SCC 353, requires before a sentence of death. And evaluation, since only criminology can say whether a legal change achieved anything.

The point at which the two meet in practice is the sentencing hearing, where a judge applying Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab, (1980) 2 SCC 684, must weigh mitigating circumstances relating to the criminal as well as to the crime. That is a criminological inquiry conducted under a legal rule.

One further distinction the question implies

Crime must also be distinguished from the two categories nearest to it, because a candidate who cannot do so has not explained the concept.

Urbanisation dissolves informal control. Migration to cities separates people from kin and community supervision and concentrates young men in settlements where the State's presence is thinnest. Durkheim's anomie and Shaw and McKay's finding that delinquency rates remain stable in particular urban zones across changing populations are the theoretical statements of this.

Prosperity changes the motive and the target. Merton's Social Structure and Anomie, 1938, predicts that a society raising expectations of material success faster than it distributes the means will produce innovation, the criminal adaptation. Illustration: Indian property crime has not fallen as incomes have risen but has changed form, from subsistence theft towards fraud and towards offences of aspiration, which is why the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 gives snatching a provision of its own.

Technology creates new offences and new methods. Illustration: the largest single change in Indian recorded crime over the past decade is the growth of cyber enabled offending, in online investment schemes, fraudulent lending applications, one time password and impersonation frauds and sextortion, prosecuted under the Sanhita's cheating and forgery provisions with the Information Technology Act, 2000, and defeating conventional policing on jurisdiction and speed.

Two qualifications keep the limb honest. First, development also reduces some crime: better lighting, vehicle immobilisers, cashless payment and closed circuit cameras have measurably reduced particular offences, which is situational prevention working exactly as Cornish and Clarke's rational choice theory predicts. Second, part of what looks like a change in the pattern is a change in reporting: telephones make complaint easier, registration became mandatory after Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, and tolerance of offences against women has fallen, all of which raise recorded figures without raising the conduct.

The elements of a crime, since the concept limb requires them

A formal definition is completed by the elements the law requires, and Indian law requires two.

Actus reus, the prohibited conduct, which may be an act, an omission where a duty to act exists, a state of affairs, or the causing of a result. Mens rea, the mental element, which the Sanhita expresses through words such as intentionally, knowingly, voluntarily, dishonestly, fraudulently and rashly or negligently, each of which carries a defined meaning.

Conclusion. Crime has no satisfactory substantive definition, and the formal one, an act or omission forbidden by law and punishable in proceedings brought by the State, carries the consequence that the question who writes the definitions is itself criminological. Criminal law and criminology are distinguished by their question, their method and their unit of concern, and they meet at the sentencing hearing, where a legal rule requires a criminological assessment. And development does not abolish crime; it redistributes it, from the village to the city, from subsistence theft to fraud, from the street to the network and from the poor to the respectable, which is why the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 contains offences of organised crime, petty organised crime and snatching that Macaulay's Code did not.