Prison term should reflect 'crime's gravity'

Punjab urges SC to discourage concurrent sentences

ISLAMABAD:

The Punjab prosecution department has told the Supreme Court that sentences should not routinely run concurrently in every criminal case, including cases involving multiple murders.

It has argued that consecutive sentences should be imposed in exceptional cases involving extremely brutal, inhuman and heinous crimes that shock the public conscience, particularly murder, kidnapping, sexual assault and terrorism.

In a written response submitted through Punjab Additional Prosecutor General Tariq Siddique, the provincial government argued that consecutive sentences for multiple murders would reflect the gravity of each offence, reinforce public confidence in the criminal justice system and serve the deterrent and retributive purposes of punishment.

A seven-member larger bench, headed by Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail, is examining two questions: whether a person convicted of multiple murders should serve life sentences concurrently or consecutively, and how the term of life imprisonment should be determined under Pakistani law.

The next hearing is scheduled for November 10.

The Punjab government maintained that courts should issue reasoned and explicit orders when directing sentences to run consecutively, particularly in exceptional cases involving crimes committed in an exceptionally cruel, barbaric or inhuman manner.

Referring to Section 4 of the Punjab Sentencing Act, 2019, the written response said the objectives of sentencing included punishing offenders, preventing and reducing crime, deterring criminal conduct, rehabilitating offenders and protecting the public.

The government argued that automatically ordering concurrent sentences in cases involving multiple victims could diminish the seriousness of additional offences and create an artificial equivalence between killing one person and murdering several.

"If courts continue to order different sentences to run concurrently in an unguarded and casual manner, a message will be conveyed to society that our criminal justice system makes no distinction between the murder of one person and the murder of several persons," the response stated.

It added that every unlawful taking of a human life should attract a distinct and meaningful legal consequence. Merging multiple sentences into a single concurrent term, the government argued, could undermine the gravity of additional murders.

The response also raised concerns about the practical duration of life imprisonment in Pakistan. It stated that, after accounting for government remissions and sentence reductions, a life sentence could effectively be reduced to around 15 years.