•Despite a murder confession, Kinoti got seven years from 2017 after he struck a deal with the DPP in which he was charged with manslaughter.
Image: FILE
Man who, alongside two friends, stormed his grandfather’s bedroom and beat him to death at night will spend only six years in jail after a plea deal.
The High Court in Meru said though 31-year-old Raphael Munene Kinoti confessed to having beaten up his grandfather to death over a plot of land, the plea deal saved him. He got only seven years behind bars, including the 11 months he spent in pre-trial and pre-sentencing detention.
He will serve a net of six years and one month.
From the deal, the DPP pressed a lesser charge of manslaughter against him, to which he pleaded guilty and was convicted.
Court documents show that the Kinoti, alongside two others, had been in a drunken stupor the whole night of October 18, 2016. But after the revelry, they walked to the home of Andrew Karigi Yohana, breaking the gate and the doors to force their way in.
They were complaining that the old man had refused to give them consent in order to dispose of a parcel they wanted to sell.
Not even a desperate plea by their grandmother, Florence Kanyire Andrew, could stop their rage.
Kinoti then led his group to the grandfather’s room where he slept and started landing on him with a metal bar and wooden clubs.
The grandmother started to scream for help, but in vain. After sometime, the old man managed to escape from the young men, running for his life into a nearby banana plantation.
That was not enough to save his life.
The young men went after him, declaring that they would only stop when his heart stopped.
Efforts by a neighbour to separate the young men from their grandfather bore no fruit as they declared that due to the land issue, they would only stop when the man was dead.
“Jennifer Ngugi Kennedy [a neighbour] tried to separate the accused persons and the assailants from the deceased and also tried pleading with them to leave the deceased.
"The accused and the two accomplices insisted that they wanted to kill the deceased swore that he would spend the night in the mortuary,” the court papers read.
Once the accused and the two assailants realised that the old man was dead, they ran away.
The neighbour dashed to the old man’s son and when they visited the scene, “found the body of the deceased to be lying in a pool of blood and the same was lifeless.”
The postmortem examination was performed on October 20, 2016. The autopsy report found that the victim's head had a deep cut wound in the right frontal region 5cm in length, bruises on the left cheek and left temporal region.
The right hand had a deep cut wound on the palm. The legs had a cut wound, superficial left leg wound around the knee region. The cause of death was found to be traumatic brain injury following assault.
In court, Kinoti confessed to the killing, citing alcohol as reason for his crime.
In a sentencing decision given on January 30, 2022, the High Court said that it had considered all the circumstances of the case but would be fairly lenient because Kinoti was a young man with a chance of reforming his ways and that the fact that he was drunk also reduced the extent of his responsibility for the crime.
“The court accepts that in sentencing the accused for the offence of manslaughter which carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment for life, credit and consideration must be given to the accused as a first offender who has pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of manslaughter and whose responsibility for the offence may have been diminished by the alcoholic drink taken at the time of the killing."
"The court will also take into account the youthfulness of the offender at 31 years with prospects of reformation and rehabilitation as well as his provider role for his young family.”
(Edited by V. Graham)