Vidhara

The Indian Penal Code, 1860

§79Act done by a person justified, or by mistake of fact believing himself, justified, by law

Nothing is an offence which is done by any person who is justified by law, or who by reason of a mistake of fact and not by reason of a mistake of law in good faith, believes himself to be justified by law, in doing it. Illustration A sees Z commit what appears to A to be a murder. A, in the exercise, to the best of his judgment exerted in good faith, of the power which the law gives to all persons of apprehending murderers in the fact, seizes Z, in order to bring Z before the proper authorities. A has committed no offence, though it may turn out that Z was acting in self-defence.

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Official text: India Code (official)

Official India Code text: The Indian Penal Code, 1860 (45 of 1860), English PDF (A1860-45.pdf) retrieved via Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshot 2020-04-21 of indiacode.nic.in (portal unreachable from ingest network). Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and @nexlex/ingest inline parser on 2026-07-15. Repealed by BNS 2023 w.e.f. 2024-07-01. Automated parse; footnotes/amendment history excluded; illustrations restored via illustration-aware re-extraction on 2026-07-19; spot-verified; full clause-level proofread pending. Eleven State-inserted sections that had been published as central law were removed on 2026-08-02 after the D-052 guard identified them: 354E, 376F, 509A and 509B (Chhattisgarh Act 25 of 2015), 379A and 379B (Gujarat Act 6 of 2019) and 382B-382F (Tripura Act 4 of 2019). They are now recorded as State amendments against the sections they attach to, not as sections of the Code (D-053).

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