Pakistan's Supreme Court has acquitted two brothers who spent close to 20 years in prison, much of it on death row, setting aside their convictions in a blasphemy case from 2006. A three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of Pakistan Yahya Afridi heard the appeals and ruled that fresh medical evidence raised real doubt about whether the men were of sound mind when the offence took place.

The brothers, Liaqat Ali and Umar Draz, were convicted on 27 March 2006 by a sessions judge in Jhang under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code. Each was sentenced to death and fined Rs500,000. The Lahore High Court upheld the sentences on 17 September 2015, and the men remained behind bars for around two decades while their appeals moved through the courts.

Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim wrote the main judgement, with Justice Shakeel Ahmad agreeing with the acquittal while adding a separate note. The defence argued a single point: that the brothers were mentally unsound at the time of the alleged offence and so lacked the guilty mind the law requires for a conviction.

The court weighed conflicting medical assessments. A three-member board at DHQ Hospital in Faisalabad had found both men mentally sound in 2007. But an eight-member Board of Certification diagnosed them in 2023 with bipolar affective disorder with psychotic symptoms, and a nine-member board in September 2025 found both brothers were suffering from bipolar disorder in a current manic episode, a long-term illness that in acute cases was most likely permanent and left them without insight into their acts.

The bench held that the unanimous view of the specialist boards, made up of senior professors of psychiatry, carried more weight than the early assessment by a board with only one psychiatrist. It treated the matching diagnosis in both brothers as compelling scientific corroboration that their mental unsoundness was an inherited, pre-existing illness. "The appellants have spent around 20 years behind bars. In the light of the opinion of medical board which raises doubts regarding the culpability of the appellants, the benefit of doubt cannot be withheld from the appellants," the court said, according to Dawn's reporting of the judgement.

The court also directed the Punjab Institute of Mental Health to make sure the brothers' psychiatric treatment continues. The ruling is a rare acquittal on mental-health grounds in a blasphemy prosecution, and it gives defence lawyers a clear apex-court statement on capacity to cite in future cases.