Journal of Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine

Crime is defined as doing of any act declared by stature or ordinance to be punishable in definite way, such as, by fine, imprisonment or death. The famous Danish 'Adoption studies' states that in addition to socio-economic factors, hereditary factors play an important role in the determination of criminality. Normally males have 46XY karyotype. The males with 47XYY karyotype may show a tendency towards behavioural problems like hyperactivity and distractibility and they are believed to be indulging in criminal activities. Studies of XYY males indicate that they are more prone to aggressive behaviour than the XYmales. The present study was conducted at Karnataka Institute for DNA research, Dharwad by collecting blood sample from 53 prisoners who were convicted under S. 302 IPC to analyze the chromosomal pattern by doing karyotyping. All the 40 out of 53 subjects who were chromosomally analyzed showed the normal 46XY chromosome pattern. No abnormality was found in terms of number of chromosomes. Majority of the crimes have occurred against property issues (58.49%), followed by financial or money issues (15.09%), dowry issue (15.09%) and rest were due to other matters. Lower socio-economic status, poor education, personal habits might have played an important role in the causation of crimes.