Wilson Kinyua was convicted of robbery with violence in 1998 and put on death row at Kamiti maximum prison. The pronouncement of the sentence was more crippling to him than the prospect of being killed.
Kinyua told a meeting to launch a death penalty report in Nairobi on Tuesday that he thinks a death row convict in 2023 is in a better psychological place than those in the 90s, given that the last execution was in 1987.
“I was afraid that I would actually be killed because it was barely 11 years after the last action. I think convicts in 2023 could be in a better place."
While the fear was crippling at first, a course in legal studies while in prison enabled him to mount a challenge against the penalty in 2016, a move that has given much reprieve to many, years later.
The case wiggled its way to the Supreme Court, which later altered the jurisprudence on death penalty in 2017 when it declared its mandatory nature unconstitutional.
He got his freedom back as a dividend of the case.
Judges are however still allowed to sentence suspects convicted of robbery with violence and murder to death. Further, nothing stops the President to mandate an execution of the death row convicts.
In the prison, Kinyua said, death row inmates feel isolated, live in uncertainty and fear that should the President give a mandate at any time, they would be summoned to the gallows.
“You would rather just be executed once and for all. Better still, if you are on life sentence, it gives you a settled mindset. Its past time to get the penalty removed.”
Kinyua maintains his innocence in his conviction and says many people are carrying the heavy trauma of death sentence and yet they are innocent as they were convicted on faulty evidence.
Kenya National Commission on Human Rights chairperson Roselyne Oded said her team was working closely with the National Assembly’s Justice and Legal Affairs committee to lobby and have the criminal procedure code and the relevant laws amended. This she said will stop courts from dishing out death penalty to capital offenders.
Though the law allows the penalty, no executions have been done in the country since 1987.
Odede spoke when a report on the social and economic profile of over 600 death row convicts in the country was launched.
Civil society actors took leverage of the occasion to sustain the public campaigns to have the government abolish the penalty.
Odede said it was time for the country to have the penalty scrapped from the law books because it is inhuman, does not accord the offenders a second chance and mostly gets the innocent folks nailed.
She also said in the event of no execution like currently is in the country, the convicts live a miserable life dogged with constant fear of being killed by the state at any time.
“The death penalty is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It is a punishment that denies all hopes as you leave in constant fear of being killed year in year out. This is coupled with poor detention conditions, methods of execution and the psychological distress,” she said.
Amnesty International executive director Houghton Irungu, and ICJ deputy executive director Juliana Matheka also said it was pointless to have the statute in the books when the state had rightly seen it pointless to execute.
-Edited by SKanyara
