The Advocate

No One Killed Shama and Shahzad: A Mob of Hundreds, Zero Convictions

On November 4, 2014, in the town of Kot Radha Kishan in Pakistan's Punjab province, a mob beat a Christian couple named Shahzad Masih and Shama Bibi, then threw them into the brick kiln where they worked and burned them alive. Shama was pregnant. They left three young children.

The mob had been told the couple desecrated pages of the Quran. Police eventually filed charges against some 660 named and unidentified suspects. The case became, for a time, the most famous crime against Christians in Pakistan's modern history.

This month, the last men still convicted in that crime walked free.

In a ruling announced July 10, following a hearing the day before, a three-member bench of Pakistan's Supreme Court, headed by Justice Malik Shahzad Ahmad Khan, acquitted Muhammad Irfan, Mehdi Khan, and Muhammad Riaz Kumbh, the final three men on death row for the killings. The same bench dismissed the Punjab government's appeal seeking to revisit the acquittals of 102 other suspects. Twelve years after two people were burned alive in front of a crowd, the number of people now held legally responsible is zero.

Everyone Says Arizona Saved the Confessional. Read the Holding. It Did Something Larger.

A unanimous Arizona Supreme Court did not rule that confession is privileged. It ruled that no judge or jury may ask whether a clergy member read his own doctrine correctly. That is a much larger rule.

Engraving of a gavel at rest on its block beside a bound volume of case reports and a furled document tied with a crimson ribbon.

A Texas Judge Just Declined to Take the Posters Down. He Did Not Say They Were Lawful.

A denied temporary restraining order is not a ruling on the merits. The hearing that matters is August 17, and the standard at stake is one Texas Christians wrote for themselves.

New York Did Not Lose in Court. It Agreed to Wait.

The July 30 order protecting four orders of Catholic nuns was entered by consent. That distinction is the whole story.

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