“Nothing is more disgraceful than for a man to be convicted of falsehood”,wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero in his celebrated work De Officiis, a treatise composed in 44 BC for moral guidance.
Cicero’s warning against falsehood was a principle meant to preserve the very credibility of law, indispensable for the survival of the Republic. It reflects the moral gravity the law attaches to credibility, reminding us that justice can never rest comfortably upon the words of a witness who dares to deceive.
The jurisprudential maxim ‘falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus’ (false in one thing, false in everything) flows directly from this same origin. It dictates that when a witness is found unreliable in one material aspect, their entire testimony stands tainted. The maxim is traceable to Roman legal tradition. Jurists whose work later influenced the Corpus Juris Civilis recognised that a deliberate falsehood by a witness undermined the integrity of his entire testimony.
For Romans, truth was indivisible: once tainted, the whole became unreliable. The principle passed into canon law during the medieval period, where ecclesiastical courts employed it to test credibility, and later it became embedded in continental civil law and, by influence, in early English common law. Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), echoed the sentiment that a witness “convicted of willful perjury in one part of his testimony” could not safely be trusted in the rest. Jeremy Bentham was equally emphatic: “Falsehood, once discovered, taints not only the particular statement but casts a shade of suspicion upon all the testimony of him who utters it”.
In common law tradition, the earliest recorded judicial application of this principle appears in the treason trial of John Hampden in 1684, where the jury was instructed that if a defendant was found to have lied about one material fact, his whole testimony might be disregarded. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has consistently upheld this maxim: in PLD 2003 SC 704, it held that false or fabricated testimony must be rejected in its entirety, for the court cannot be invited to perform the impossible task of “sifting grains of truth from heaps of lies”.
Again, in PLD 2009 SC 427, the court categorically declared that once a witness is unreliable in material aspects, his testimony cannot be accepted in piecemeal. In 2021 SCMR 550, it reaffirmed that prosecution witnesses who perjure themselves cannot be treated as partially credible. Likewise, the US Supreme Court in S v Gilmore (2001) observed: “The maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is a sound rule of law, founded upon logic and common sense; a witness who deliberately falsifies on a material point should be distrusted in all”.
Tragically, in the trials arising out of the events of May 9, this cornerstone of justice stands compromised. Convictions of PTI leadership were secured chiefly on the dubious testimony of police constables – statements marred by contradictions, some of which the trial courts themselves dismissed as bogus, yet paradoxically relied upon in fragments to convict. A judgment built upon witnesses whom the court itself has branded dishonest cannot, by any principle known to law, sustain the weight of justice.
The prosecution’s case was based on two police constables, whose words became the scaffolding for conspiracy convictions against political leaders. Their testimony purported to describe a clandestine meeting at Zaman Park: who attended, where they sat, what was said. Yet, under scrutiny, their story collapsed. The trial court itself held that the allegations regarding the presence of Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Fawad Chaudhry and a few others were false. The constables had fabricated not only the presence of individuals but even the geography of Zaman Park, misdescribing the very layout of Imran Khan’s residence. Once fabrication is established, the law is inexorable: the testimony is void in toto. To act otherwise is judicial abdication.
Yet despite acknowledging these falsehoods, the court salvaged the residue of their testimony, discarding some parts while retaining others to secure convictions. This selective belief is a travesty of law. The doctrine of ‘falsus in uno’ is the safeguard of liberty. It ensures that no man may be condemned by the word of a proven liar. To abandon it is to expose every citizen to the arbitrary sword of false testimony.
The trial court’s approach contravenes binding precedent and undermines the very edifice of criminal law. Under Article 189 of the constitution, the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s pronouncements are not optional suggestions but binding commands. By disregarding this doctrine, the trial court has aligned itself not with our constitution, but with what Dostoevsky, in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, called the “twisted logic of the dungeon” – where truth is fractured and fragments of falsehood are passed off as justice.
The law of evidence has long been described as the very foundation of the judicial process. A trial stripped of evidence becomes mere theatre: persuasive speeches without substance and accusations without anchors. Evidence is the bridge between allegation and reality, suspicion and certainty. Thus, evidence is not a technicality but the lifeblood of justice itself. Judges and juries are not witnesses; they rely upon testimony, documents and traces to piece together events to reenact. For this reason, the law insists that evidence must not only exist but be credible. Without credibility, the entire edifice of adjudication collapses.
Unless the superior judiciary intervenes, our tragedy will remain: that in Pakistan, in the year 2025, people were condemned not by truth, but by lies dressed as evidence. What the public sees in these convictions is the convenient rearrangement of lies into partial truths to secure a predetermined result. This corrodes public confidence, transforming the judiciary from a guardian of rights into an extension of power.
In the final reckoning, these trials resemble not the impartiality of a court of law, but the parodies of justice found in literature.
The writer is a Lahore-based advocate of the high court.
