Legal Dictionary of Pakistan
Quick lookup for English, Urdu, and Latin legal terms used in Pakistani jurisprudence.
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)).
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.