30 years for man who killed neighbour as death sentence quashed

In the morning of August 19, 2007, he told a neighbour that he was looking for one John Mwinzi to kill.

The neighbour, knowing the anger of Douglas, frantically reached out to Mwinzi and told him about the threats. He told him that he should be safe.

True to his word, later that day at a local market, Douglas tracked down his target and gave him a chase before stabbing him in the chest. Mwinzi fell to the ground and died on the spot.

Douglas was later arrested in 2014, arraigned in court, where he was convicted and sentenced to death. 

But Douglas now has a reprieve, after an appellate court allowed his appeal against the sentence, finding that it was excessive and harsh.

The court has given him a 30-year jail term in a decision the three-judge bench rendered on March 22.

His appeal against conviction failed on the basis of the strength of an eyewitness account that was found to be credible.

The neighbour had told court that “at about 6pm, he saw the appellant chasing the deceased while carrying a panga [and that] the deceased ran towards a house, but before he could open the door to the said house, the appellant, who had caught up with him, stabbed him with a panga on his chest. The deceased fell down to the ground.”

Douglas’s rebuttal when put on his defence was that the neighbour was an unreliable witness because he had a personal problem with the him (Douglas) arising from the sale of Miraa that went bad in 2005.

Postmortem conducted two years later on September 7, 2009, showed that the deceased had a penetrating wound on left side of his chest.

The doctor who performed the exercise told court the cause of death was cardio respiratory arrest secondary to damage to the heart and great blood vessels due to a penetrating chest injury.

Douglas raised an alibi that he was not at the scene of crime at the time the deceased was stabbed, but the judges said the facts were not on the man’s side because his victim was well known to him because they were working together.

Also, that Douglas had not refuted the report that he directly told the neighbour that he wanted to kill the victim.

“From the nature of injuries sustained by the deceased, the learned judge correctly inferred that the assault on the deceased was meant to cause death or grievous harm. We find that the appellant was properly convicted by the trial court,” the judges said.

“The upshot of the above is that we dismiss the appeal against conviction but allow the appeal against sentence. We hereby set aside the death sentence that was imposed upon him, and substitute therefore a sentence of 30 years imprisonment, to take effect from the date when the appellant was arrested.”