SECTION 71 IPC : Maximum sentence for an offense made up of many offenses: The offender shall not be punished with the punishment of more than one of such his offenses, unless it is expressly stated, when anything that is an offense is composed of parts, each of which parts is itself an offense. 1The offender shall not be punished with a more severe punishment than the Court which tries him could award for any one of such offences [where anything is an offence falling within two or more separate definitions of any law currently in force by which offences are defined or punished, or where several acts, of which one or more would by themselves or themselves constitute an offence, constitute, when combined, a different offence].
Illustrations
(a) A beats Z with a stick fifty times. Here, A may have intentionally wounded Z through both the totality of the beating and each individual hit that makes up the entire beating. If A were subject to punishment for each strike, he could spend fifty years in prison—one year for each strike. But throughout the entire thrashing, he is only subject to one penalty.
(a) However, if Y gets in the way while A is beating Z and A purposefully strikes Y, because the blow given to Y is not a part of the act whereby A voluntarily causes harm to Z, A is subject to one punishment for the blow provided to Y and to a different punishment for the blow delivered to Z.