The majority of prisoners on death row were on drugs at the time of arrest, a study by Kenya National Commission on Human Rights shows.
The survey, which was commissioned by the University of Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit, said over 60 per cent of the inmates said they were using cannabis (marijuana) when they were being apprehended.
Almost 20 per cent of the prisoners said they were using khat (miraa) at the time.
The survey said about 10 per cent of the death row prisoners were high on both marijuana and miraa.
It added that about five per cent were on cocaine, two per cent on cocaine and cannabis, heroin and cocaine (1 per cent), heroin (1 per cent) and methamphetamine (1 per cent).
“A greater proportion (43 per cent) had been ‘relying on alcohol’ at the time of arrest (drinking more than they thought they should be), and almost a third (32 per cent) said they had a history of alcohol or substance misuse,” the report of the study said.
The report said Kenya has approximately 600 prisoners on death row. It said many more have been sentenced to death in the past decades but have had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
It revealed that the majority of those sentenced to death (56 per cent) were convicted of robbery with violence with 44 per cent for murder.
The report, "Living with a Death Sentence: Prisoners' Experiences of Crime, Punishment and Death Row" was compiled following a study commissioned by the University of Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit.
The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the lives of prisoners on death row in Kenya.
It focuses on prisoners’ socio-economic backgrounds and profiles, their pathways to, and motivation for, offending and their experiences of the criminal justice process and imprisonment.
The study sampled 671 prisoners across 12 Kenyan prisons, which included not only those currently under sentence of death but also those previously sentenced to death who later had their sentence commuted.
