The Supreme Court has observed that in criminal jurisprudence, every case must be evaluated and decided on the basis of its own distinct factual circumstances. The court held that the testimony of each witness, along with every surrounding fact and circumstance, must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, as no two criminal cases have exactly identical factual settings.

Nor can human behaviour and conduct under stress be reduced to a fixed or uniform standard. A three-member bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar and comprising Justice Salahuddin Panhwar and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, announced the judgment in a murder case titled Muhammad Azhar and Muhammad Shahzad versus the State and another.

Petitioner Muhammad Azhar had filed an appeal against the judgment passed by the Lahore High Court Bahawalpur Bench on September 13, 2021. He was convicted under Section 302(b) of the Pakistan Penal Code for the intentional murder of Mst Sakhian Bibi and sentenced to death, along with compensation of Rs200,000, by the trial court on February 28, 2018.

Co-accused Muhammad Abbas was acquitted. The High Court dismissed his appeal but commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment.

The petitioner subsequently filed a petition for leave to appeal before the Supreme Court. After hearing the matter at length, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal, ruling that no grounds had been found for interference.

The court held that the reasons given by the High Court for commuting the death sentence to life imprisonment were also plausible. Therefore, no case for enhancement of the sentence was made out.

Consequently, the civil petition for leave to appeal was also dismissed and leave was refused. The incident occurred in broad daylight in clear visibility, leaving no room for misidentification, says the seven-page judgment authored by Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim.

The court also noted that the petitioner was already known to the witnesses because of ongoing litigation between the families, ruling out any possibility of mistaken identity or substitution. Our opinion is that eyewitness behaviour in criminal cases is subjective and varies significantly from person to person.

As such, human responses are shaped by an individual's psychological resilience, environmental influences and personal life experiences, the judgment states. Therefore, in the case at hand, this slight divergence does not impair the truthfulness of the natural eyewitnesses, whose accounts remain thoroughly consistent regarding the identity of the assailant, the weapon used, the close range of firing and the primary target areas on the victim's body.

The court observed that in criminal jurisprudence, human behaviour could not be subjected to a fixed formula, nor could every witness be expected to react to, observe or retain events in an identical manner. Every individual responds differently to a sudden traumatic situation: while one person may observe details, another may freeze or lose the ability to perceive what is happening.

In our social and cultural context, a grieving son who just witnessed the murder of her mother cannot reasonably be expected to conduct a physical inspection of her body at the crime scene merely to count each firearm wound before reporting the occurrence to the authorities, the judgment concludes.