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Crime and Punishment:
Most culprits escape punishments from courts due to lack of evidence or the prosecution not doing their job proficiently. Consequently not a single terrorist has been punished so far and this fact alone is contributing a great deal in the lawlessness of Karachi. The prosecutors and the judges have to do their jobs better, but speaking realistically they too have their problems. Police, apart from being generally corrupt, can’t get strong evidence for the following reasons:
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The defence or the prosecution buys off the police who temper with the evidence.
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The genuine witnesses hesitate to come forward for fear of being dragged in to the courts for months to come and thus waste their time and business hours.
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Witnesses do not wish to buy the ill will of the criminals who threaten them even with their lives if they adduced anything damaging against them, etc. This is especially so in the case of blasphemy and other extremist cases – eg: murder of Governor Taseer.
The judges too suffer from the similar malaise. In that:
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Some of them can be purchased by one or the other party.
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They are threatened with dire consequences if the judgement is given against one or the other party. Their school going children are threatened to be kidnapped. Some of the judges have taken refuge abroad after pronouncing correct judgement in a few Anti Terrorists cases.
Agreed that the lawyers are professionally committed to do their job, but they should provided relief and defend the innocent ones or the aggrieved party only and not the guilty and the aggressors. By defending a KNOWN murderer aren’t they encouraging the crime – in a way?! I have yet to see a lawyer initially not accepting the brief for a habitual or known offender or asking to be relieved to defend the accused any further the moment he comes to know during the proceedings that his client is ACTUALLY guilty of the crime.
On the contrary SMART lawyers boast to have successfully defended so many accused murderers!!! If they (Lawyers) stop defending the actual culprits the crime rate will come down drastically.
Col. Riaz Jafri (Retd)
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