Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa on Monday said the current interpretation of the life imprisonment law is flawed, expressing the intent to reexamine it at an ‘appropriate time’, media reports said.
During the hearing of a review petition of a murder case, Justice Khosa said the span of life imprisonment is limited to 25 years when it is meant to last a lifetime. He expressed the intent to review the law. “We will interpret the law correctly at an appropriate time. Once it happens, convicts will ask for a death sentence instead of life imprisonment,” he remarked. “Once it happens, we’ll see who commits murder,” he added.
Section 57 of the Pakistan Penal Code, fractions of terms of punishment, says, “In calculating fractions of terms of punishment, imprisonment for life shall be reckoned as equivalent to imprisonment for twenty-five years.”
The Supreme Court, however, had observed in 2004 that the provisions of the aforementioned section, which reckon 25-year imprisonment, only stipulate the calculation of the punishment term which is necessary because certain offences are a fraction of the term of imprisonment prescribed for other offences.
This is not the first time that the judiciary has made such observations. In 2004, a five-member bench heard as many as 62 appeals that urged the apex court to reinstate death penalty for convicts whose capital punishments were commuted into life imprisonment leading to their release on the basis of remission in their imprisonment periods.
