Kasyoka Munyili was convicted of stabbing his estranged wife Agnes Kanza Nyamai to death and sentenced to 35 years in prison. But he will now serve 30 years.
Nyamai was attending a local women's chama meeting in Kasengeini village, Kibwezi, on September 6, 2015, not knowing the feuds with her husband would end her life.
Kasyoka, with whom she had separated due to home squabbles, had come to the meeting venue way earlier and was waiting to pounce on her.
When Nyamai arrived and was chatting with other chama members, Kasyoka emerged and pulled her to the side.
When she returned to where the other women were, blood was oozing from the left side of her stomach. Her right arm had multiple injuries.
“Kasyoka ameniua (Kasyoka has killed me),” she shouted in desperate cry to her friends.
The man took to his heels and vanished.
Shortly after, Nyamai lost consciousness and the women rushed her to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
The postmortem showed she had suffered a deep cut to the medial left arm extending to the bones and blood vessels, had laceration on abdomen, intestines were protruding and the right hand had a cut on the palm.
Also, it found that “there was blood in the chest cavity left side and in the abdominal cavity and spleen was lacerated.”
“[The doctor conducting the autopsy] formed the opinion that the cause of death was cardio respiratory arrest secondary to haemorrhage or bleeding from multiple penetrative injuries to the spleen and deep cut upper limb severing upper limb vessel,” the court papers says.
Kasyoka was arrested, tried and convicted in a judgment delivered at the High Court on July 19, 2019.
The court held that the viciousness of the attack without any provocation warranted a sentence of 35 years imprisonment.
He appealed the sentence last year, complaining that he was inhumanely handled.
While expressing remorse, he told the court that the sentence "was harsh, dehumanising, degrading and excessive [and] did not take into account that he was an old man and would go beyond the normal life expectancy period."
He was 49 years old in 2022 when the appeal was being heard.
Kasyoka also complained that the sentence "ignored that he was a family man who needed to go back home to look after his family".
Though the court eventually agreed to slash the sentence by five years, it said the man deserved to be jailed for killing his estranged wife.
"..... the deceased met her death in a rather inhuman and cruel manner. The appellant viciously attacked her unprovoked, thus unwarrantedly took away a life and deprived young children of dearly needed mother’s love."
The judgment dated May 12, 2023 says the reduction would ensure that the man serves his sentence and be reformed to smoothly integrate back into society.
