A Bengali official accused Warren Hastings of bribery, was charged weeks later with forging a dead banker's bond, and was hanged under an English statute

Maharaja Nandakumar had been governor of Hugli and an old rival of Warren Hastings. A banker, named Bulaki Das in later accounts^†, died in 1769. The banker's executor, Gungabissen, sued Nandakumar for sums owed to the estate. Nandakumar said a bond from the dead man cancelled the debt, but refused to produce it. In March 1775 Nandakumar accused Hastings, now Governor-General, of corruption; Wikipedia gives the alleged bribes as more than one-third of a million rupees. Council members hostile to Hastings took up the charges. In April 1775 Chief Justice Elijah Impey, a school friend of Hastings, ordered the bond handed over. On 6 May Nandakumar was charged with forging it. His trial began on 8 June before Impey and three other judges and lasted seven days. The jury found him guilty. The court applied an English statute that made forgery a capital crime; Justice Chambers doubted it applied in Bengal. Nandakumar was hanged at Cooly Bazaar, Calcutta, on 5 August 1775. Edmund Burke and Macaulay later called it a judicial murder. In 1787 Sir Gilbert Elliot moved to impeach Impey, and on 9 May 1788 the Commons rejected the main charge, 73 to 55. In 1885 Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote that "no man ever had, or could have, a fairer trial." Nandakumar left a widow, Rani Kshemankari, a son and two daughters.