In the decade following the enactment of the reforms of the 1997 Criminal Amendment Act, the murder conviction rate collapsed from 29 per cent in 1990 to barely 12 per cent by 2000.
Families signed papers, blood money changed hands, and the state quietly stepped aside, watching the circus as if homicide were a minor misunderstanding between neighbours, thus showcasing a bitter reality that had shaped and allowed an instalment plan for the crime of murder, proving that forgiveness, not justice, has become our most negotiable commodity. The state, ever gracious, will even notarise your repentance.
This dates back to the finalisation of the Indian Penal Code (1860). This, while a collective effort, has been credited mainly to Thomas Babington Macaulay, who designed the first draft in 1837 and famously declared that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India”. It was a law written by men who had never met a moulvi or a priest but felt fully qualified to legislate morality. His words still echo every time a colonial section number collides with a religious injunction in our law books. Pakistan still uses over 85 per cent of Macaulay’s original text, barely altered since 1860 and written in Calcutta.
A century later, instead of replacing that colonial skeleton, we grafted religion into it. In 1990, the Qisas and Diyat were formally introduced, and by 1997, it was solidified as it became permanent. The system hasn’t stopped glitching since. The reform rewired the very concept of homicide: ‘culpable homicide’ became qatl-e-amd and justice shifted from the state to the victim’s family. Qisas could be waived in favour of diyat; retribution replaced by reimbursement.
What began as divine mercy soon became social currency: the poor forgave, the powerful paid and the state pretended this was justice. By 1997, over 70 per cent of homicide cases in Punjab were being privately compromised according to Law & Justice Commission data. The state, once the sovereign dispenser of punishment, had become a mere witness to negotiated redemption.
What followed was not just a legal pivot, but a systemic shift. As Qisas and Diyat became embedded in Pakistan’s legal code, murder convictions dropped dramatically. In the Supreme Court, the conviction rate for murder fell from 79 per cent in 1984 to just 35 per cent by 2000, a trend directly linked to the rise of out-of-court compromises and pardon-based acquittals. Cases that once ended with prison or the gallows now ended with affidavits and signatures.
The law claimed that justice was served, but the public said justice was rather bought. As the amendment introduced the privatisation of punishment, the courtroom became a marketplace where redemption could be priced and repentance sold. In 2012, Karachi’s Shahzeb Khan was shot dead after a trivial roadside dispute. His killer, Shahrukh Jatoi, heir to an influential family, was sentenced to death – only to walk free ten years later after being ‘forgiven’. The victim’s family pardoned him; the state, apparently, had no objections except perhaps the citizens who funded the courts he strolled out of.
The system, once meant to reflect divine mercy, soon began to enable elite impunity. In the notorious Raymond Davis case (2011), a US contractor accused of killing two Pakistani men was released after the victims' families were paid $2.4 million in Diyat. There are even reports cited by a Lahore High Court judge that in some cases, perpetrators retracted the payment after receiving their legal pardon, knowing the justice system offers no recourse once the paperwork is filed.
The script is familiar. In 2016, Qandeel Baloch’s brother proudly confessed to killing her ‘for honour’. When the family tried to pardon him, public outrage forced a reluctant amendment that finally made such crimes non-compoundable. Yet even that reform felt like a clerical correction, not a moral awakening.
This showcased that in Pakistan, even guilt has a payment plan. Interest-free, religion-compliant and socially endorsed. Forgiveness is no longer a virtue but rather a transaction. Our courts now mediate between the soul and the chequebook.
These tensions in law were met with some patchwork reforms enacted in 2004 and, for a brief moment in 2016, the state realised that it existed. The 2004 reforms added definitional clarity to compoundable offences; the 2016 amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code barred compromise in honour killings, forcing the courts to treat ‘honour’ as aggravation, not justification. But every reform in Pakistan behaves like a band-aid over a visible, temporary and oddly proud of itself bullet hole.
Despite these efforts, we legislate like surgeons stitching over fractures, never quite resetting the bone. Every amendment promises coherence; every amendment delivers compromise. The penal code remains a Frankenstein’s monster of colonial prose and religious injunctions.
This led to a constitutional hangover. The constitution promises life, equality and due process, while the penal code promises negotiation. Article 9 of Pakistan’s constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty, a bold statement by the state, showcasing its moral responsibility to protect its citizens. Yet at the same time, through Sections 309 and 310 of the penal code, the state delegates that responsibility back to individuals. These provisions enshrine the right of the victim’s family to forgive or compound the offence and to attach a price to that forgiveness.
A murderer’s fate depends less on the gravity of his act than on the liquidity of his victim’s kin. The wealthy buy redemption; the poor are expected to display virtue by forgiving.
Thus, Pakistan’s criminal law stands on two pillars that refuse to meet and between them hangs a fragile idea of justice. This system becomes more vague when we merge the idea of morality with the law, which makes it difficult to understand either, raising yet another debate.
It is safe to say that we have built a system in which sin can be settled and sanctity notarised, a moral economy that sells absolution by the paragraph. And every time the state forgives what it should punish, it loses a little more of its soul.
The writer is a lawyer.