Capital Offenders to Be Jailed for Life

March 11, 2004
Ben Agina
Nairobi

President Kibaki has commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment, Bomas delegates were informed yesterday.

Justice and Constitutional Affairs Ministers Kiraitu Murungi said the Government was determined not to hang anybody, as the punishment was inhuman.

Murungi said death sentence had no place in modern society. "It is retrogressive to retain it in the new constitution," he observed, while contributing to the debate on the retention of the penalty under Article 41 of the Bill of Rights.

Last year, the Prisons Department said the penalty should be abolished and substituted with life sentence.

And none of the current East African Presidents has ever sanctioned the hanging of any prisoner since they took over power.

Instead, they have consistently commuted death sentences into life imprisonment.

Recently, the London-based Amnesty International Report on Kenya indicated that none of the 126 people sentenced to death in 2002 was executed despite the courts' refusal to vote for a UN resolution calling for the abolition of the penalty during the 58th Session of the UN Commission of Human Rights.

According to AI, Kenya refused to vote on another resolution condemning arbitrary execution and impunity.

Nominated MP Ruth Oniang'o suggested that serial rapists, child defilers and murderers should be sentenced to death.

Mr Martin Shikuku supported recommendations to have the penalty retained, saying it would be unfair to sentence a murderer to life imprisonment.

Justice and Constitutional Affairs assistant minister Robinson Githae said it was up to the delegates to decide either to abolish or retain the penalty.

He added that he was "totally opposed" to it. "Modern states have abolished death sentence."

Mr Simeon Shitemi said were it not been for the penalty, freedom fighter Dedan Kimathi would not have died.

He caused laughter when he said the Government of Botswana recently advertised for the post of the hangman and no one applied for it.

The delegate recalled that no one had been hanged in Kenya in the recent past.