ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a petition seeking review of its Jan 23 verdict of restoring the five-year sentence awarded to Shah Hussain by a sessions judge of Lahore on March 30 last year.

Shah Hussain was convicted of stabbing his fellow student Khadija Siddiqui 23 times on May 3, 2016, near Lahore’s Shimla Hill where she, along with her driver, had gone to pick up her younger sister Soofia from school. Khadija now has done her Bar-at-Law at the City Law School, City University, London.

Moved through counsel Shah Khawar, the review petition was heard by a three-judge Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa. With the rejection of the review petition, the earlier five-year conviction stands intact.

Shah Khawar argued before the court that the girl named his client after five days and there was a strong possibility that his name surfaced after deliberations and suggested that his client may have been implicated and connected later.

Shah Hussain stabbed fellow student Khadija Siddiqui 23 times in Lahore on May 3, 2016

How it is possible that the driver and the younger sister could not identify the attacker, the counsel argued, emphasising that there was a difference between the cases of murder and attempt to murder.

At this, the chief justice observed that even a single injury would amount to attempt to murder case, adding the one who came with an intent to kill never threw challenges to his opponent before assaulting.

However, the chief justice observed that the courts were always open to rectify any error, if pointed out.

Earlier, in a detailed judgement announced on Jan 29, the chief justice had regretted that the Lahore High Court, which overturned the Lahore sessions judge’s decision to sentence the accused while deciding the case of Ms Khadija, had failed to demonstrate the requisite care in examining the record and, as a result, glaring misreading of the record had been committed.

The detailed judgement also highlighted the downright misreading of the evidence committed by the LHC by ignoring many critical aspects of the case available in the evidence.

‘‘The exercise of appreciation of evidence in this case by the high court has, thus, been found by us to be laconic and misreading and non-reading of the record which led the LHC to a serious error of judgement, occasioning failure of justice and clamouring for interference in the matter by the Supreme Court,’’ the verdict had stated.

‘‘A judgement of acquittal suffering from serious misreading or non-reading of the evidence materially affecting the final outcome of the case is nothing short of being perverse and, hence, not immune from interference,’’ the verdict had contended.

Apart from that the high court ought to have appreciated that it was only seized with revision petitions, and not an appeal, and in exercise of its revisional jurisdiction, the high court ought to have confined itself to correctness, legality, regularity or propriety of the proceedings of the courts rather than embarking upon a full-fledged reappraisal of the evidence, an exercise fit for appellate jurisdiction only, the judgement had said.

‘‘In the case in hand, the trial and appellate courts had undertaken an exhaustive analysis of the evidence available on the record and had then concurred in their conclusion regarding guilt of respondent (Shah Hussain), having been proved beyond reasonable doubt.

‘‘In the absence of any error of law committed by the courts and in the absence of any illegality, irregularity or impropriety committed by the courts in the trial or hearing of the appeal, the high court ought to have been slow in interfering with the concurrent findings of fact recorded by the courts,’’ the verdict had observed.

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2019