- Daniel Gecheru Getanda, Francis Oganyo Karani and Joseph Mwangi Mang’era served in a local community policing committee in Kisii.
- On February 7, 2009, they stormed the house of one Robert Nyaribo who at the time was visited by a girlfriend who was apparently his blood relative.
Image: FILE
Three vigilante members have escaped the hangman’s noose by skin of their teeth for killing a man they suspected of having an affair with his cousin 14 years ago.
They will now serve 20 years in jail starting in 2009 when they were first arraigned.
Daniel Gecheru Getanda, Francis Oganyo Karani and Joseph Mwangi Mang’era served in a local community policing committee in Kisii but the villagers largely considered them a vigilante due to their ease of meting out violence on people they deemed to be criminals or those brought to them for various alleged offences.
On February 7, 2009, they stormed the house of one Robert Nyaribo who at the time was visited by a girlfriend who was apparently his blood relative.
Facts of the case show that the girlfriend, Rael Biyaki, visited the man at 4pm on the fateful day and spent time in his house to around 8pm.
Then word went round that the two were holed up in the house and were in fact planning to get married. It also emerged that the woman’s parents had admonished her against getting into an affair with Nyaribo.
When Biyaki left Nyaribo’s house and went to her sister’s place, her mother got furious when she learnt that the two cousin lovers had been together that evening.
Evidence in court showed that the mother called the three men who then went to discipline the man but sparing the woman.
Court papers say that “they went to the [Nyaribo’s] house that same night, took him from his house, assaulted him, then dropped him off at his father’s compound in an unconscious state, whilst informing [his father] that [Nyaribo] had committed an offence by having a love affair with [Biyaki]. They, then, ran away.”
Shortly thereafter, Nyaribo’s mother and father confirmed that Nyaribo had died and called the police.
The three would then be arrested after days of search and were arraigned at the High court on a murder charge. Their case dragged on to their conviction in June 2014. They were sentenced to death.
But at the court of appeal, the three did not contest their conviction, only sought to have their death sentence overturned for being excessively harsh.
Their two grounds of appeal were that the High Court judge who sent them to the hangman “erred in law and in fact by imposing the mandatory death sentence upon the[m]” and that the judge misdirected himself when he imposed “a harsh and excessive sentence taking into account the mitigation on record as well as the circumstances under which the offence was committed.”
In a determination dated September 27, the court sided with them, saying that the sentence against them was extreme and they deserved some leniency given their mitigation in which they expressed remorse.
The court termed their killing of them man for breaking a taboo as extreme violence and heartless.
“The appellants not only took the law into their hands but rather arrogantly and recklessly inflicted horrific violence on a defenseless young man whose only crime was, apparently, to fall in love (with the wrong woman). They dragged him from his home when he was healthy and hale. They returned him there later - barely a breath from death – and arrogantly announced to his parents, rather insensitively, the (petty) reason for their atavistic actions,” the judges ruled.
“The upshot is that considering all these factors, we hereby allow the appeal against sentence, set aside the death sentence that was imposed by the trial judge and substitute thereto a sentence of imprisonment for 20 years for each appellant. The custodial sentence will begin running from July 17, 2009, the date each appellant was arraigned in court for plea, since all the appellants were in custody during the pendency of the trial,” the judgement said.