In her first major ruling, Justice Martha Koome and the Supreme Court have allowed the mandatory death penalty to remain in place for offences other than murder – particularly treason and robbery with violence.
The Supreme Court was considering the Muruatetu case which declared in 2017 that a mandatory death penalty was unconstitutional. Reading the ruling, Koome said that further applications were required to lift the automatic death penalty for offences other than murder.
This judgment is a bit weird. If the death penalty should not be mandatory for murder, why should it continue to be mandatory for lesser offences?
There have been no executions in Kenya for almost 30 years. That is a sign that there is no place for the death penalty in the modern world. It is cruel and inhumane. It could be abused in future by a rogue president or vindictive administration.
It is unnecessarily cumbersome to require the legal community to make separate fresh applications to remove the death penalty for other offences.
Instead the Chief Justice should start working with the Attorney General to get the death penalty permanently removed from the Penal Code.
Quote of the day: "Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done."
Robert A. Heinlein
The American science fiction writer was born on July 7, 1907
