A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa, on January 23 setting aside the LHC judgement directed police to arrest the assailant of law student Khadija Siddiqui and send him to jail.
According to the prosecution, the respondent No 1 namely Shah Hussain had given multiple knife blows to his class-fellow Khadija Siddiqui and her minor sister Sofia Siddiqui on 03.05.2016 in and outside a motorcar belonging to the victims' family parked along a roadside in Lahore.
The trial court has awarded Shah Hussain seven-year sentence, while the sessions court has reduced it sentence to five years. Shah Hussain then approached the high court, which had turned down the sessions court order and acquitted him. Khadija then challenged LHC verdict in Supreme Court.
The detailed judgement written by CJP Asif Saeed Khan Khosa says, "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 by the High Court has been found by us to have led the said Court into a serious error of judgement occasioning failure of justice and clamouring for interference in the matter by this Court."
A judgment 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 apex court said apart from that the High Court ought to have appreciated that it was only seized of 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 below rather than embarking upon a full-fledged reappraisal of the evidence, an exercise fit for appellate jurisdiction.
The judgement said the trial and appellate courts in this case had undertaken an exhaustive analysis of the evidence available on the record and had then concurred in their conclusion regarding guilt of respondent No 1 (Shah Hussain) having been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
In the absence of any error of law committed by the courts below and in the absence of any illegality, irregularity or impropriety committed by the courts below 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 below.