KARACHI, Pakistan — Shafqat Hussain, the youngest of seven children, came to Karachi from Kashmir in search of work in 2003. Having struggled with a learning disability, Shafqat failed in school. He was 13 years old when he dropped out, barely able to read or write. He sought refuge in a metropolis that had no space to give and was quickly relegated to the city’s fringes. He never saw his parents again.

When he was 14, still four years under Pakistan’s legal age of adulthood, Shafqat was detained illegally by the police and severely beaten. The boy was held in solitary confinement, his genitals were electrocuted and he was burned with cigarette butts. The policemen interrogating him removed three of his fingernails. Sadly, Shafqat’s case was not the exception. It was the rule. He was told that he would never escape police custody or his torturers until he confessed to a crime he did not commit, the murder of a 7-year-old boy.

Shafqat was then falsely convicted on charges of kidnapping and murder, and sentenced to death.

His eldest brother, Manzoor, spoke to the BBC last December about Shafqat’s confession under torture. “When I asked him about torture in custody,” Manzoor said to the press, Shafqat “started shivering and wet his pants. He put both his hands on his head and starting crying, saying, ‘Don’t ask, I can’t tell you what they did.”’ The only evidence the courts had against him was a confession he made after nine days of being tortured in a police cell.

Shafqat was not tried as a juvenile. Nor was he given access to a lawyer when presented with the charges against him. His mother hasn’t seen her son in 10 years. She cannot afford to travel to Karachi to see Shafqat now, before he is to be killed.