When Criminal Procedure Fails Public Trust |
By: Dr. Abdul Ghani
Justice is supposed to protect society while safeguarding individual liberty, but when criminal procedure stops serving this delicate balance, it begins to undermine public confidence in the law itself. A criminal justice system derives its legitimacy not merely from statutes and courtrooms, but from the belief among citizens that the law is fair, impartial, and capable of distinguishing between guilt and innocence. In Pakistan, however, this belief has been steadily weakened. Weak investigations, procedural delays, and exploitable legal loopholes have transformed justice into an uncertain and often unreliable outcome. Instead of consistently protecting the innocent and restraining the guilty, the system frequently does the opposite, deepening public mistrust and reinforcing the perception that justice is selective, delayed, and, at times, entirely absent.
This troubling reality was starkly acknowledged by the Islamabad High Court, which described the criminal justice system within its jurisdiction as “alarming and abysmal,” observing that it was no longer serving its intended purpose but had instead become a source of grave injustice. These remarks were made in a strongly worded judgment authored by Athar Minallah at the conclusion of proceedings that resulted in the acquittal of the accused in seven separate murder cases. The judgment did more than decide individual appeals; it exposed deep and systemic failures in police investigation and prosecution. The fact that individuals could remain incarcerated for years, only to be declared innocent at the appellate stage, revealed how procedural defects and institutional negligence can destroy lives long before the truth emerges.
Such cases illustrate one side of the crisis: the suffering of innocent individuals who become victims of a flawed process. Years spent in prison cannot be returned, families cannot be restored to what they once were, and the stigma attached to criminal accusations often lingers even after acquittal. When justice arrives after a decade of wrongful incarceration, it offers little consolation. Instead, it leaves behind a trail of irreversible damage and reinforces the belief that the system is incapable of correcting its own mistakes in time.
At the same time, the very same criminal procedure that fails to protect the innocent often enables habitual offenders to remain free. The case of Muhammad Ali from Lahore illustrates this contradiction with disturbing clarity. He began dealing in narcotics in 1990 and was first arrested in 1997. After securing bail, he returned to the same criminal activity. Over the next twenty three years, police records show that he was arrested around twenty times, including multiple arrests between 2001 and 2020. Each arrest followed a familiar pattern: registration of a case, presentation before a court, grant of bail, and release. Even when he was arrested red handed by Faisalabad police in May 2020, the outcome remained unchanged, and he again succeeded in obtaining bail by relying on procedural provisions under the Code of Criminal Procedure.
This repeated cycle of arrest and release highlights how procedural safeguards,........