The proverb 'you want everything, you miss everything' perfectly sums up the experience of Moses Mwangi Waguri, an old man convicted of sexual abuse who sought to have his five-year jail term overturned but instead got it enhanced.
The grandfather from hell who is a serial sexual offender and who lured his small granddaughter and defiled her will be in jail for eight years.
The man had been convicted for the offence and sent to jail for five years in 2018 but in 2020, he opted to attempt his luck in appeals. Court records show that the man had an earlier conviction of sexual offence before the present case saw him dragged to court.
This time, he had defiled his own granddaughter aged below 11 years.
At the Court of Appeal, the man sought to have the conviction and sentence overturned.
Midstream, he changed his mind, abandoned his appeal against conviction and chose to go after the sentence.
In doing so, he also dropped his advocate, and decided to argue his appeal in person.
Rather than giving cogent grounds for his appeal when the matter came up for hearing, Waguri gave his mitigation a fresh, highlighting his suffering in jail and that he wanted to be free to go be a preacher.
“In support of his appeal against sentence, the appellant submitted that due to the suffering he had endured in prison, he had introspected on his life and he was now reformed; that he was remorseful for the offence he committed and that if granted a non-custodial sentence, he was going to become a preacher," court records state.
He urged the court to be merciful and review his sentence considering that while in prison, he had contracted diabetes and medication for the illness was not available in prison.
But the judge said that the magistrate who tried the man was wrong in giving him a paltry five years, considering the ages of the victim and the perpetrator and that the case deserved a deterrent sentence.
“Having considered the mitigating and aggravating factors in this case, including the age of the appellant and the age of the victim as well as their relationship, I find that this is a case that warrants a deterrent sentence considering that the appellant, being the child’s grandfather, abused his position of trust and instead of protecting the child became her tormentor. I have also considered the fact that the appellant was not a first offender. The record shows that he has a previous similar conviction.”
The judge, Cecily Githua, added: “I find that a sentence of eight years imprisonment is appropriate for the appellant in this case. Consequently, the sentence imposed by the trial court is substituted with a sentence of eight years imprisonment.
"The sentence shall take into account the period of about one and a half months that the appellant was in lawful custody before he was released on bond on April 30, 2018.”
The judge, however, still gave a paltry sentence given that Section 5(1) of the Sexual Offences Act, which creates the offence of sexual assault, prescribes a penalty of not less than 10 years imprisonment, which may be enhanced to life imprisonment.
In fact, the judge had faulted the trial magistrate for the lenient sentence, saying that “the learned trial magistrate [had] wrongly invoked Section 8 (2) of the Sexual offences Act which is the penal provision for the offence of defilement where the victim was 11 years or below which prescribes a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.”
