Judge Khoja Ahmad Saddiqi could order a thief's hand amputated as punishment for his crime, a sentence common under the former Taliban regime and its extreme interpretation of Islamic law, known as Shariah.
But in the two years since the Taliban were forced from power, Saddiqi, head of the Afghan Supreme Court's judicial and criminal division, has yet to order an amputation.
"If we implement Shariah correctly, there's no need to cut off a hand," said Saddiqi, whose thick black beard and swirling turban indicate his status as a Muslim cleric, who also regularly leads prayers at a Kabul mosque. Rarely would an execution be handed down by the courts, he added.
Afghans on Monday marked the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the holiest time of year for Muslims, when they believe God began to reveal the holy book Koran to the Prophet Muhammad.
Now, framers of the country's post-Taliban constitution are debating just how much of those 1,400-year-old lessons to include.
A commission has been laboring over a draft constitution for months, and its much-delayed release is expected in the coming days. An assembly of representatives from across the country is to consider the draft in December, paving the way for nationwide elections in June next year.
The implementation of Shariah is especially sensitive here, given its harsh interpretation by the Taliban, who forced men to grow beards and pray, banned girls from schools and most jobs, and toppled walls onto homosexuals to crush them to death.
While recognizing the fundamental fact that Afghanistan is an Islamic nation -- with a nearly 100 percent Muslim population -- the latest version of the constitution shies away from mentioning Shariah.
The spirit of the current draft is of "a society that's moderately Islamic but also lives in peace and understanding with the rest of the world," said Jawid Luddin, President Hamid Karzai's spokesman.
Early drafts of the document included elements of Shariah, and conservatives have continued to push for making it the basis of all laws, said Ahmad Nader Nadery, spokesman for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has lobbied to remove Shariah and include freedom of religion in the draft law.
"It's very easy to misuse Shariah against the basic rights of people," Nadery said.
Instead of Shariah, the constitution is set to include an article stating that "no laws shall run counter to the sacred principles of Islam," as written in an earlier draft copy. The country will be officially known as "the Islamic republic of Afghanistan."
It will be left to lawmakers later to iron out how that translates into the specifics of the criminal and civil code, and whether to legislate other tenets of the Islamic faith -- such as prohibitions on alcohol, whether adultery should be recognized as a crime or how to sentence thieves.
Especially critical will be how far the laws go to protect women's rights, recalling the harsh discrimination they suffered under the Taliban who forced their disappearance from all public life.
Judge Saddiqi thumbed a white paperback copy of the criminal code from 1976 -- when Afghanistan was ruled by King Mohammad Zaher Shah. He still uses the code today, though he said Shariah law remains his first reference in tricky cases.
He said the Taliban's lightning-speed trials -- sentencing a thief one week and having a doctor using anesthesia cut off his hand the next -- bore no resemblance to real Shariah law.
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