• Elijah Chesire Kibor returned home at 7.30pm to his village in Marakwet. It was in 2010.
• He then descended on his wife Gladys Chemutai with kicks and blows, and she screamed in pain.
Image: FILE
A man who used an arrow to kill his neighbour who came to stop him from beating his wife will while time away in jail as he awaits the hang man.
In what could be a warning shot to wife batterers who turn their rage on well-meaning neighbours, an appellate court affirmed the death sentence to a man who clung on being drunk as a defense.
Elijah Chesire Kibor returned home at 7.30pm to his village in Marakwet. It was in 2010.
He then descended on his wife, Gladys Chemutai, with kicks and blows, and she screamed in pain. Residents came to help her.
Seeing the crowd outside, Kibor reached for his quiver of arrows, and started to shoot at the crowd under the cover of darkness in a bid to disperse them.
One man was not lucky. An arrow struck him and he died on the spot.
Kibor voluntarily surrendered to the police the following morning.
A postmortem report presented in court indicated the man “died as a result of excessive blood loss with injury to the spinal cord around the cervical (sic) causing the lungs to collapse leading to cardiac arrest.”
Kibor’s defense in court was that he shot multiple arrows at the crowd to defend himself. He claimed the mob was baying for his blood and had set his house on fire.
He argued he had no malice against the deceased, was intoxicated when he committed the offence and did not know what he was doing.
None of that could save him. The High Court convicted him of the murder charge and sentenced him to death on July 2, 2013, in Eldoret.
Kibor tried his luck at the Court of Appeal.
His argument was that the judge convicted him without having the offence proven exhaustively. He also argued he was drunk, that the postmortem was not conducted by a specialist and that the prosecution case was insufficient evidence.
But the prosecution rejected his claims, asserting that Kibor’s use of intoxication as a defense was untenable.
“…. and that when an accused person raises the defense of intoxication, he should prove that he did not know what transpired. In this case, the appellant reported to the police he had killed a neighbour and that by his picking arrows when the neighbours came to the house, he knew what he was doing,” the judgment read.
On self-defence claim, the document read, Kibor gave no evidence he was attacked and “there was no evidence the neighbours were armed; that the appellant shot the deceased at the back of his neck; and that there was no evidence the appellant was acting in self-defence.”
The three-judge bench dismissed his appeal.
“We find that the trial court correctly held that there were minor and inconsequential discrepancies that did not go to the root of the prosecution case and the trial court was right in treating them as such. In the end, we are in agreement with the trial court that the appellant, with malice aforethought, was responsible for the death of the deceased,” the judgment read.
“Accordingly, we find that the trial court rightly convicted the appellant for the offence of murder. In the result, the appeal has no merit and is dismissed in its entirety.”