KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Tuesday commuted the death penalty of a man into life imprisonment in a case pertaining to the murder of his wife.

An additional district and sessions court had sentenced Ghulam Rasool to death in November 2021 for murdering his 28-year-old wife, Mumtaz Begum, at their house in Mohammadi Colony within the remit of the Docks police station in November 2018.

The convict, through his lawyer, challenged the capital punishment before the high court and after hearing both sides and examining the record and proceedings, a two-judge bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha dismissed the appeal, but reduced the sentence from death to life term.

The bench in its judgement observed that the judicial confession of the appellant had been made voluntarily and the circumstantial evidence in terms of the last seen evidence was also trustworthy and supported by medical evidence.

It further said that as per his confessional statement, he had contracted second marriage with the victim woman, who was also a divorcee and had three children from her first husband.

The bench further noted that the appellant’s judicial confession was not retracted as in his statement before the trial court he simply said that he confessed on the instruction of police.

All the procedural safeguards were followed by the judicial magistrate while recording confession and the same could not be dictated to him by police as it was too long and detailed and covered some aspects which the police did not even know about, it added.

It further said that the confession was in line with the case of prosecution especially as the appellant’s matrimonial difficulties/disputes had been corroborated by other evidence.

The judgement stated that the landlord of appellant and his wife were the last seen witnesses and they had no reasons to falsely implicate the accused and gave their evidence in a straightforward manner and were not dented during cross-examination, it added.

“With regard to sentencing it appears that there was no premeditation in the murder and since the case is based on circumstantial evidence we would veer on the side of caution and reduce the death sentence imposed on the appellant to life imprisonment and to pay compensation of Rs100,000 to the legal heirs of the deceased,” it concluded.

Published in Dawn, September 21st, 2022