Legal Dictionary of Pakistan
Quick lookup for English, Urdu, and Latin legal terms used in Pakistani jurisprudence.
Imprisonment
n. 1. The act of confining a person, esp. in a prison <the imprisonment of Jackson was entirely justified>. 2. The state of being confined; a period of confinement <Jack-son's imprisonment lasted 14 years>. See FALSE IMPRISONMENT.
Prison
A state or federal facility of confinement for convicted criminals, esp. felons. - Also termed penitentiary; penal institution; adult correctional institution. Cf. JAIL.
Prisoner
1 A person who is serving time in prison. 2. A person who has been apprehended by a law-enforcement officer and is in custody, regardless of whether the person has yet been put in prison. "While breach of prison, or prison breach, means breaking out of or away from prison, it is important to have clearly in mind the meaning of the word 'prison.' If an officer arrests an offender and takes him to jail the layman does not think of the offender as being 'in prison' until he is safely behind locked doors, but no one hesitates to speak of him as a 'prisoner' from the moment of apprehension. He is a prisoner because he is 'in prison . . . whether he were actually in the walls of a prison, or only in the stocks, or in the custody of any person who had lawfully arrested him . . . . "' Rollin M. Perkins & Ronald N. Boyce, Criminal Law 566 (3d ed. 1982) (quoting 2 Hark. P.C. ch. 18, $ 1 (6th ed. 1788)).
Queen's prison
A prison established in 1842 in Southwark, to be used for debtors and criminals confined under authority of the superior courts at Westminster, the highest court of admiralty, and the bankruptcy laws. ( It replaced the Queen's Bench Prison, Fleet Prison, and Marshalsea Prison but was closed in 1862.
de frangentibus prisonam
n. [Latin "of those who break prison"] Hist. The statute providing that an escaped prisoner will not be put to death or forfeit a limb simply for escaping from prison unless the original crime required that penalty upon conviction. 1 Edw. 2.
dum fait in prisona
n. [Law Latin "while he was in prison"] Hist. A writ restoring a man to his estate after he transferred the estate under duress of imprisonment. See DURESS OF IMPRISONMENT.
duress of imprisonment
The wrongful confining of a person to force the person to do something.
false imprisonment
A restraint of a person in a bounded area without justification or consent. ( False imprisonment is a common-law misdemeanor and a tort. It applies to private as well as governmental detention. Cf. false arrest under ARREST. "[In the phrase false imprisonment,] false is . . . used not in the ordinary sense of mendacious or fallacious, but in the less common though well-established sense of erroneous or wrong; as in the phrases false quantity, false step, false taste, etc." R.F.V. Heuston, Salmond on the Law of Torts 123 n.38 (17th ed. 1977). "False imprisonment was a misdemeanor at common law and is recognized by some states today. It differs from kidnapping in that asportation is not required. If the imprisonment is secret, some jurisdictions treat it as kidnapping." Arnold H. Loewy, Criminal Law in a Nutshell 65 (2d ed. 1987). "Some courts have described false arrest and false imprisonment as causes of action which are distinguishable only in terminology. The two have been called virtually indistinguishable, and identical. However, the difference between them lies in the manner in which they arise. In order to commit false imprisonment, it is not necessary either to intend to make an arrest or actually to make an arrest. By contrast, a person who is falsely arrested is at the same time falsely imprisoned." 32 Am. Jur. 2d False Imprisonment ยง 3 (1995).
prison breach
A prisoner's forcible breaking and departure from a place of lawful confinement; the offense of escaping from confinement in a prison or jail. ( Prison breach has traditionally been distinguished from escape by the presence of force; this distinction has been abandoned in some jurisdictions. - Also termed prison breaking. Cf. ESCAPE (2). "Breach of prison by the offender himself, when committed for any cause, was felony at the common law: or even conspiring to break it. But this severity is mitigated by the statute de frangentibus prisonam, I Edw. II, which enacts that no person shall have judgment of life or member, for breaking prison, unless committed for some capital offence. So that to break prison, when lawfully committed for any treason or felony, remains still a felony as at the common law; and to break prison, when lawfully confined upon any other inferior charge, is still punishable as a high misdemeanor by fine and imprisonment." 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 130-31 (1769).
prison camp
A usu. minimum-security camp for the detention of trustworthy prisoners who are often employed on government projects.
prisoner at the bar
An accused person who is on trial.
prisoner of conscience
Int'l law. A person who, not having used or advocated the use of violence, has been imprisoned by reason of a political, religious, or other conscientiously held belief or by reason of ethnic origin, sex, color, or language.
prisoner's dilemma
A logic problem - often used by law-and-economics scholars to illustrate the effect of cooperative behavior - involving two prisoners who are being separately questioned about their participation in a crime: (1) if both confess, they will each receive a 5-year sentence; (2) if neither confesses, they will each receive a 3-year sentence; and (3) if one confesses but the other does not, the confessing prisoner will receive a 1-year sentence while the silent prisoner will receive a 10-year sentence. See EXTERNALITY.