Picture this: a man stands in the dock. His palms are open. His brow is furrowed. His eyes? Hollow, not from guilt but from sheer exhaustion. He has stood here before. Many times. This time, the judge is different, the charge sheet reworded, the file freshly stamped. The crime? Identical. The accused? The same. The evidence? Immovable. Only the stage lights altered. The script remains dreadfully familiar.
Welcome to Pakistan’s post 26th Amendment judicial theatre—May 9 edition. A production patently violating the double jeopardy principle. So farcical that even Orwell would find its grotesque predictability tiresome. A political theatre masquerades as jurisprudence, choreographed by the state, featuring the same recycled accusations, duplicate FIRs, and the revolving cast of familiar defendants. The audience is expected to applaud. But justice, unfortunately, is not a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. It doesn’t get better with each mechanical reprise.
Behold the plot: individuals, mainly PTI leadership, accused of gathering at the abominable alleged Zaman Park Meeting to hatch a criminal conspiracy on May 9th. Admittedly, all participants of the aforementioned meeting have already faced trial either in Lahore, Faisalabad or Sargodha. Some were convicted. Some were acquitted. As per the principle of double jeopardy, end of story, right? Not in this charade. Cue the Encore: The Return of the Trial in More 9th May FIRs—now playing in judicial cinemas in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Faisalabad, Mianwali, and other cities. The cast remains steadfast, the lines identical, same dialogues, same story. Only the legal costumes have been swapped out for fresh but equally hollow attire.
And then, the pièce de résistance, the star witnesses stride in: two police constables of such remarkable auditory prowess that, while entering the Zaman Park residence of Imran Khan, they claim to have overheard the entire criminal conspiracy unfolding inside. Not content with such mere happenstance, they further report, with commendable heroism, to have continued their surveillance from beneath a table apparently invisible, inaudible, and in possession of ears so finely tuned they would shame the great Sherlock Holmes himself. These two stalwarts, it must be noted, serve as the state’s star witnesses in every single May 9 trial, proving that in this drama, not only the accused, the charges, and the evidence remain the same, but even the witnesses are dutifully recycled from one performance to the next. Let’s be blunt, the case itself is a farce. The police witnesses? Bogus. The allegations? Cooked up. If you’re wondering whether this is justice or just lazy screenwriting, you’re not alone.
The accused are not mere names etched on a charge sheet; they are fathers, sons, educators, professionals
Even if, and this is a massive if, we accept the prosecution’s dubious script and wooden witnesses, the double jeopardy law is crystal clear: you get one trial. That’s it. One performance. No sequels. Not even a poorly reviewed spin-off. The doctrine of double jeopardy is not some obscure footnote. It’s one of the oldest, most sacred principles in legal history. Ancient Athens prohibited repeated trials with the principle of “ouden dipsēphizesthai—you don’t get to keep rolling the dice until you get the outcome you want”. The Romans chimed in with “Nemo debet bis vexari pro una et eadem causa—no one should be harassed twice for the same cause”. This wasn’t just legal poetry, it was embedded into the very spine of Roman law, which went on to shape European systems. By the 12th century, English common law was fully on board with the principle of double jeopardy. Then came the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment: “No person shall… be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”
And Pakistan? Article 13 of our Constitution speaks with unmistakable finality: “No person shall be prosecuted or punished for the same offence more than once.” Section 403 of the Criminal Procedure Code echoes the same principle: once tried, an individual cannot be retried on the same facts. Our superior judiciary has reiterated this protection with unwavering consistency. In Baz Muhammad v. The State, the Supreme Court cautioned against the artifice of fragmenting a single incident into multiple criminal trials. In Nazir Ahmed v. Capital City Police Officer, Lahore, it declared, without equivocation, that once a person has been tried—whether acquitted or convicted—they cannot be tried again on identical facts. The doctrine of autrefois acquit applies where: (i) there has been a previous trial; (ii) before a court of competent jurisdiction; (iii) resulting in a judgment; (iv) involving the same parties; and (v) arising from the same facts. The Supreme Court invoked the ancient maxim: nemo debet bis vexari pro una et eadem causa—no one should be troubled twice for the same cause. Once adjudicated, the matter is closed. No remakes. No curtain calls.
The Indian Supreme Court, in the Maqbool Hussain 1953 case, condemned repeated trials as a betrayal of constitutional principles and firmly held that once acquitted or convicted, a person cannot be tried again for the same offence. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Green v. United States (1957), forcefully rejected the notion of subjecting an individual to multiple prosecutions, anxiety and expense. Going even further back, the English courts in The King v. The Duchess of Kingston (1776) affirmed that verdicts, whether conviction or acquittal, are final. Justice, unlike amateur theatre, does not require endless reruns.
The High Courts and the Supreme Court, as the guardians of our Constitution, have a solemn duty to uphold Article 13’s fundamental rights of protection against double jeopardy
In open defiance of Article 13 of our Constitution, binding Supreme Court rulings, and centuries of global jurisprudence that treat double jeopardy as an unbreakable rule, the May 9 prosecutions march on undeterred. The same people, over the same alleged criminal conspiracy, are herded from one courtroom to another like a travelling circus of legal futility—Lahore, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Mianwali, Sargodha and wherever else a gavel can be found. Each charge rehashes the same “criminal conspiracy,” points to the same alleged meeting at Zaman Park, and rests on the same two miracle witnesses—two police constables blessed with such supernatural powers. What we are watching is not law, it is a bad soap opera on state funding, endlessly recycled, badly acted, and embarrassingly self-aware.
The law is no longer a shield—it has been twisted into a performance, being stretched to the point of parody. The accused are not mere names etched on a charge sheet; they are fathers, sons, educators, professionals. They’ve already faced the system for the same charge. Some have been found guilty. Others have been acquitted. But all are now ensnared again, because once accused, always accused, it seems for 9th May theatre. Their real crime? Allegedly present at an alleged meeting that the State has retrofitted into the opening act of a criminal conspiracy (offence) script. And now, every courtroom becomes a stage where they must re-enact their guilt, again and again, until someone finally applauds that the performance is finally convincing. “There is no cruelty more refined,” wrote Dostoevsky, “than to give hope where there is none.” And what is an acquittal, if not a dark joke, when another FIR waits backstage like an understudy for its cue?
The true cost cannot be tallied in legal pages. It is written in sleepless nights, splintered families, and children asking, “Again, father?” In lost jobs. In banned travel. In delayed weddings. In dignity worn thin. And most tragically, in the slow death of public faith in justice.
Why? Because when the system demands a prosecution spectacle, law becomes choreography and justice takes the shape of performance art. Meanwhile, the accused stand alone, tragic protagonists in an absurdist loop, where even acquittal is just an intermission.
So what is to be done? The answer is not submission, it is judicial defiance. The High Courts and the Supreme Court, as the guardians of our Constitution, have a solemn duty to uphold Article 13’s fundamental rights of protection against double jeopardy. They must rise and say: Enough. Let the doctrine of double jeopardy breathe once more. Justice is not a ghost story to be endlessly replayed. It is not a theatre. The state cannot be allowed to play legal poker, reshuffle the legal deck until it finds a desired outcome. As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear: “The wheel is come full circle.” But in this judicial theatre, the prosecution wheel does not stop—it spins endlessly, grinding justice into repetition. This is not a casino. It is a courtroom and it’s time it started acting like one.
