TheEconomistJune 1st 2019 471T
he dayGhulam Qadir and Ghulam Sar-
war were acquitted of murder after a
miscarriage of justice should have been a
moment to celebrate. The brothers had
been awaiting execution for over a decade,
only for the Supreme Court belatedly to
quash their case. Eyewitness testimony
against them was shaky and the prosecu-
tion case flimsy, the justices declared. Yet
when officials sought to bring the pair the
good news, they had a shock. They had
been hanged a year earlier. No one had told
the court or their lawyer.
This combination of injustice and in-
competence is common in capital cases in
Pakistan, a new report argues. Two ngos,
the Foundation for Fundamental Rights,
which is based in Pakistan, and Reprieve,
based in Britain, have studied the 310
known cases in which the Supreme Court
reviewed death sentences between 2010
and 2018. They found that the justices re-
voked 78% of them. About half of those
overturned ended in outright acquittal.
The rest saw sentences commuted or a re-
view initiated. If these proportions hold for
Pakistan’s 4,700 death-row prisoners,
some 1,800 should be set free. As many
should have their sentences commuted or
their cases retried or reviewed. But such re-
prieves do not come quickly. The average
death-row prisoner spends ten years under
threat of execution before the case reaches
the Supreme Court.
The country’s highest judges often com-
plain that lower-court convictions rely on
dubious “eyewitness” testimony. Some-
times it is directly at odds with the physical
evidence. Particularly suspect are “chance”
witnesses—people unrelated to killer or
victim who, prosecutors claim, happened
to observe a murder or other crime by coin-
cidence. These witnesses often give evi-
dence deemed clinching even if there is no
proof they were present when the crime
was committed. Such witnesses are some-
times people known to bear a grudge
against the accused.
The Supreme Court also often questions
the reliability of the police. Corrupt cops
have been found not only to tamper with
(or concoct) witness statements, but also to
plant evidence and collude with victims or
their families. Confessions are often ex-
tracted by beating.
Blundering and inconsistency are also
rife. Bungled identity parades, in which the
police do not stick to required procedures,undermine even cases in which credible
witnesses identify culprits. The lower
courts can be arbitrary, too. Evidence
strong enough to send one suspect to the
gallows, for instance, is deemed too weak
to convict his co-accused.
Then there is the question of which of-
fences merit execution. A total of 27 crimes
can lead to a death sentence, ranging from
murder, treason, kidnap and drug smug-
gling to blasphemy. But many Pakistanis
are put on death row for crimes the highest
court does not believe warrant execution.
Over the nine years the ngos looked at, the
court did not uphold a single death sen-
tence for a non-lethal offence. Even for
murders, it appeared to favour life sen-
tences for all but the most heinous. Yet
lower courts often impose death sentences
for drug crimes, for example.Supreme mercy
More than 500 people have been executed
since 2014 (pictured is the central jail in the
north-western city of Peshawar, where
some of the hangings took place). And yet
the Supreme Court seems ever more scepti-
cal about capital cases. In 2018 it upheld the
death penalty in just 3% of those it re-
viewed. Among the death sentences it
overturned was, most famously, that im-
posed on an alleged blasphemer, Asia Bibi,
which it said was based on “concoction in-
carnate”. Amnesty International, a Lon-
don-based watchdog, has recorded a drop
in recent executions, from at least 87 in
2016 to 60 in 2017 and 14 in 2018. Yet Amnes-
ty recorded at least 360 death sentences
handed down in 2016, over 200 in 2017 andThe death penalty in Pakistan
The ultimate wrong
ISLAMABAD
Miscarriages of justice are breathtaking in their frequency and cruelty
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