LAHORE, Dec 15: Public prosecutors all over Punjab are not filtering out weak cases, wasting the government’s time and resources by uselessly pursuing them in trial courts and ultimately resulting in acquittal of the accused.

The prosecutors’ failure to properly check whether cases are fit for trial or not and to suggest how to remove the shortcomings for making them trial-worthy and result-oriented is being attributed to their lack of willingness and ability, police inefficiency or corruption and limitations of the related laws.

To suggest measures to improve the mechanism, the provincial prosecution department has constituted a committee comprising the prosecutor general and a senior prosecutor. All the prosecutors would be issued guidelines in the light of the committee’s recommendations, sources said on Sunday.

According to the sources, the public prosecutors are required to identify flaws in the cases and submit them to the trial courts within 14 days of their filing. But they usually meet the 14-day timeframe by ignoring proper filtering of the cases and not ensuring removal of the weaknesses through investigation police, mainly to avoid being held responsible for the delay.

The sources say that even those who find out shortcomings in cases do not refer them back to the investigation police fearing that they may not remove the flaws within the timeframe because of their inability or mala fide.

The prosecutors do send their reports to the courts but generally hide major flaws in cases on the assumption that the defence lawyers would use them to the benefit of the accused. While assuming so the prosecutors overlook the fact that the defence lawyers are not that naïve and they can identify the weaknesses on their own. Pursuing weak cases not only results in acquittals but also wastes the time and resources of government. In fact, the prosecutors are pursuing the cases despite full realisation that they are weak and wont get the accused punished.

Official figures prove the futility of the prosecution service. According to the data, from January to November this year, challans of 34,928 cases were filed (at that time the backlog was 443,876 cases taking the total to 478,804) and out of these the accused were convicted only in 58,504 cases. The acquittals on merit were 5,934, those without any merit were 27,999 in magisterial courts and 4,922 in sessions courts. There were compromises in 22,444 cases and 131,485 cases were consigned (filed) reportedly due to poor investigation and weak cases.

The number of pending cases is 541,616 and most of these are weak and are not likely to get the accused punished.

Official sources say cases are made by police and majority of the policemen shirk work or are corrupt, having no interest in engaging the forensic laboratory for getting evidence. And the problem is that the prosecutors have no legal authority to make the police perform as per the requirement.

The sources say a major flaw in the prosecution service is that prosecutors do not maintain any record of their work.

They deal with bail, remand and convictions but there is no legal mechanism available to make them maintain the record, rendering the authorities concerned unable to check what they have done in pursuing cases, or what they intend to do.

In Germany where conviction rate is hundred per cent, the prosecutors are in charge of investigations and there is no time limit for submitting challans. Due to this power, the investigators make police prepare strong cases without the fear of any deadline. And they send the cases for trial only when they know that they are strong enough for conviction.

“Police here tend to keep the number of registered cases low to show their performance. And the prosecutors’ performance depends on how many cases they are pursuing. We need to change all this if we are serious in getting the accused punished and saving time and money in pursuing cases which are false or weak ab initio,” said a senior official.