Justice delivered

Five years have passed since Noor Mukadam was tortured and beheaded in an Islamabad house, and her killer has finally run out of courts to appeal to. Zahir Jaffer's review petition against his death sentence has been dismissed by the Supreme Court, which found no evidence for his claim of mental illness and refused even to convene a medical board to test it. A review, the bench noted, reargues nothing already settled.

Getting here took a trial court verdict, a High Court appeal, an original Supreme Court judgment and now this review, with each stage adding months or years while the sentence held. Convictions of this kind, upheld this firmly, are exactly the message the law is supposed to send, that violence against a woman will be met with the full weight of the sentence prescribed for it, regardless of who the accused is. What this case has proven is that severe punishment, consistently applied, is a real deterrent. The task now is to make it the rule rather than the exception because the cases have not stopped coming. Barely a week ago, a woman in Rawalpindi's Askari Apartments was found hanging with her hands bound and a wire noose around her neck, with police booking her husband for murder. In May, senators called for tougher enforcement after Rubina Chandio was killed in an honour-related attack in Sindh. June brought further cases, including an acid attack on Dr Mahnoor in Quetta, an attempted abduction of a teenage girl in Gujranwala and the gang rape of a teenager in Ghotki, allegedly filmed to blackmail her family into silence.

The lesson from Noor's case must therefore extend beyond one conviction. Courts must impose the harshest lawful punishment where guilt and brutality are firmly established. Women will remain vulnerable until punishment is not only severe but certain.