Pakistan is hardly a country that is squeamish about the use of the death penalty. From the accused killer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, to a man who claims to be Christ, at last count, there were nearly 5,000 people (28 of them women) awaiting execution in Pakistan.

Their offenses ranged from blasphemy against Islam to drug smuggling to murder and unlike the United States, where death sentences are meted out with an almost ritualistic precision, capital punishment in Pakistan can be a somewhat free-form affair, authorities and death penalty observers say.

In many cases, executions are conducted in prison in plain view of thousands of other inmates, many of whom are themselves facing death sentences, authorities say.

In other cases, executions are public events. A report released earlier this year by Amnesty International detailed a case in which an Afghan tribesman was executed in North Waziristan, a lawless tribal area not far from the gleaming modern capital of Islamabad after a tribal council there found him guilty of murder. "The father of the victim shot the Afghan dead in front of thousands of tribesmen."

Javed Iqbal’s sentence sparked a quick condemnation from human rights officials around the world. Asma Jahangir, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, told the Associated Press: "You don't answer back a sick man in a sick way by the state…this is judicial anger and emotionalism…it is barbaric and arouses the fascistic instincts in a society."

Even some of Pakistan’s most conservative voices were troubled by the sentence.

Lahore, Pakistan grand mosque (AP)

The Council of Islamic Ideology, in a statement released just days after the sentence was handed down, charged that the verdict violated Islamic teachings, which prohibit the desecration of a body. And the newspaper Dawn editorialized against the sentence.

“The learned judge,” the newspaper wrote, “has deemed it fit to…replicate the atrocities committed by the child-killer.” The sentence “indicates the outrage felt by the court – and ordinary citizens – at the atrocity.

“The question of whether the state can or should match savagery with savagery needs to be examined with the greatest of caution,” the editorial continued.

“Ours has already become a brutalized society…and such steps as those now prescribed can only push us further down the road to adopting vengeance as an acceptable mode of conduct or retribution at a time when we want to present an image of ourselves as a sane and progressive nation.

“It can only be hoped,” the editorial concluded “that when the case goes in appeal to higher courts, the judgment will be closely scrutinized on both legal and moral grounds.”

In fact, the case did go to a higher court. But the Lahore High Court. demurred, saying the case did not fall under its jurisdiction and referred the appeal to the local Sha'aria, the religious court.