12/08/2026
A Judicial Mediation Between Qisas & Ta’zir
A Judicial Meditation on Life, Retribution and Due Process
Khalid Mehmood V. The State (2024 P.Cr.L.J 1212)
Lahore High Court, Rawalpindi Bench
It was not merely the confirmation of guilt that lends this pronouncement its enduring value. It is in its treatment of the question of Qisas versus Ta’zir that the Court offers what may justly be regarded as a masterclass in Islamic penal philosophy, precise in its reasoning yet expansive in its erudition.
Visiting the doctrinal heart of the judgment, the Court confronted a question of profound doctrinal consequence, whether the sentence of death imposed as Qisas ought to be sustained, or whether the conviction properly belonged to the category of death as Ta’zir. In unraveling this distinction, the Bench traced the genealogy of the relevant penal provisions, recalling how they were once declared repugnant to the Injunctions of Islam by superior judicial forums, a finding that occasioned their wholesale revision so as to align temporal law with divine command.
From this foundation, the judgment expounds, with evident scholarly delight, the tripartite architecture of punishment recognised in Islamic Jurisprudence, namely Hadd, Qisas and Ta’zir. Hadd, the Court explains, is that measure of punishment ordained directly by the Almighty for a defined class of offences, admitting neither compromise nor pardon. Qisas, by contrast, is the principle of equitable retribution, life answering for life, a right vesting not in the state but in the victim or, in the case of homicide, in the legal heirs, and therefore amenable to waiver or compounding through reconciliation. The Court enriches this exposition with reflections upon the scholarship on lex talionis and under Quranic injunction, before turning to Ta’zir, that residual and discretionary category of chastisement reserved for offences in which the exacting standard of proof required for Hadd or Qisas remains unfulfilled.
It is here that the judgment reveals its truest sophistication. The Court observes that a sentence of death as Qisas may be sustained only where proof exists in one of two forms, either a voluntary and true confession recorded before a court competent to try the offence, or evidence meeting an elevated evidentiary threshold read in harmony with the Islamic safeguard known as Tazkiyah al Shuhood, that solemn inquiry into the moral probity and truthfulness of witnesses. Upon a meticulous audit of the record, the Court found that neither condition stood satisfied. The plea of guilt relied upon by the trial forum had been elicited in the absence of legal representation, in derogation of the fundamental right to counsel, and it had never been put to the accused during his subsequent examination on the incriminating material, thereby rendering it incapable of being used to his detriment. Nor had the requisite inquiry into the character and credibility of witnesses, indispensable to Tazkiyah al Shuhood, ever been conducted during the course of trial.
Guided by these findings, the Court held, with commendable candour, that the sentence of death as Qisas was replete with a gross legal error and accordingly recast the conviction as one attracting death as Ta’zir rather than Qisas. The severity of the sentence remained undiminished, yet its juristic character was transformed, from a private right of retribution capable of being forgiven by the victims’ kin, to a public chastisement imposed solely at the discretion of the state. In this single stroke, the judgment illuminates a truth too often overlooked, that the finality of a sentence need not depend upon the label affixed to it, yet that very label carries doctrinal and even theological consequence of the highest order.
Having found the guilt of the accused established beyond reasonable doubt, and discerning no mitigating circumstance to temper the enormity of the crime, the Bench ultimately upheld the conviction and confirmed the sentence of death, albeit reclassified as Ta’zir. It is a pronouncement, in sum that marries unflinching moral seriousness with meticulous doctrinal fidelity, a rare confluence of penal severity and jurisprudential rigour that merits study not merely for its outcome, but for the intellectual architecture upon which that outcome rests.
Rule of Law, Qisas and Ta’zir, Islamic Jurisprudence, Criminal Law, Judicial Scholarship
