LAST Tuesday, an anti-terrorism court acquitted Mustafa Kanju, son of former state minister for Foreign Affairs Siddique Kanju, of murder in a case related to the death of a young boy, Zain (aged between 13 to 16 years according to various reports) in a shooting incident in Cavalry Ground Lahore in April earlier in the year.

According to the prosecution, Mr Kanju was inebriated when his vehicle was in an accident with another car. In his state of inebriation and resultant anger Mr Kanju opened fire and a completely innocent bystander was fatally hit. Zain — the innocent bystander — according to reports, was the young son of a widowed mother. The incident had happened in broad daylight, in a public place, in the middle of an urban centre.

A Kalashnikov rifle had also been reportedly recovered from Mr Kanju. How then, did he get acquitted?

It is quite simple really. All the prosecution witnesses — persons who had come to the police as witnesses and described the scene and Mr Kanju’s involvement therein — retracted their statements when it came time to testify in court.

The actual guilt or innocence of Mustafa Kanju is not the point.

What does a court do when there is not a single witness who is willing to recognise the accused person as the person guilty of the crime? It acquits of course.

Does it make sense that tens of prosecution witnesses who had implicated Mr Kanju in the murder of Zain all suddenly realised that they were wrong? Does it make sense that Zain’s uncle, who had filed the complaint and spoken openly and in the media accusing Mr Kanju of murdering his nephew suddenly had a change of heart?

Does it make sense — as Mr Kanju’s legal team contended — that Mr Kanju’s enemies were able to gather tens of people in the middle of a posh urban locality of Lahore to frame him for murder? Now consider the following:

First, according to news reports, on one of the dates of hearing Mustafa Kanju’s lawyer reportedly told the court that a ‘compromise’ was in the works between the parties.

Second, in the arguments over whether he should be acquitted, the prosecution argued that cases had been registered against the complainant and the witnesses (those who were retracting their statements) under Section 213 of the Pakistan Penal Code ie accepting gifts to protect an offender from punishment.

We often lament that our court system is faulty for it fails to bring people to justice. The fact of the matter is that a court is, and should be, only as good as the evidence before it.

If the prosecution has no witness implicating the accused, then a court should feel inclined to acquit. The failure therefore, is a not a judicial failure necessarily — it is a systemic failure.

Until a holistic approach to criminal justice is adopted where the police as the gatherers of evidence, the prosecution as its evaluators in deciding whether to go ahead with a case, and a court with its role of ensuring a fair hearing are seen together as three institutions necessary for effective criminal justice delivery, victims like Zain will continue to be let down.

Yet, the appetite for such reform is non-existent. Our reforms involve snazzier police stations, newer computers, new court complexes, higher salaries — but the processes remain the same.

Can we ensure that witnesses do not get intimidated or threatened into changing their testimony?

Can we ensure that they do not get paid to change their testimony or give false testimony against an innocent individual?

Until we can do that, the powerful, the rich, and the violent will be able to implicate who they will and extricate who they will.

Herein is our tragedy, the system suits the powerful, the rich and the violent because our state institutions are weak and the weaknesses of those institutions is precisely what allows the powerful to wield their influence so there is no incentive to change it.

So those who wield the levers of state power, more often than not, have the least incentive to change the way the government operates and those who suffer greatest have the least means to change it.

Mr Kanju has been declared innocent, but the actual guilt or innocence of Mr Kanju is not the point. The point is that we can all recognise and acknowledge a pattern in our society.

The rich and powerful have a reasonably reliable, systemically available, get-out-of-jail card, while for the poor we have the law in all its broken glory.

You can of course be innocent, but it must help to know that you do not need to be innocent to be free.

So yes, Zain is a tragedy, but the real tragedy is that Zain is a tragedy on repeat.

The writer is a Lahore-based lawyer.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2015

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