Photo: Daily Nation
Ruth Wanjiku Kamande.
By Stella Cherono
On Thursday, beauty queen Ruth Kamande became the latest guest of the hangman.
Kamande was sentenced to death for stabbing to death her boyfriend Farid Mohammed in Buru Buru, Nairobi, in 2015.
As the debate on merits of the sentence continues online, here are quick facts on death sentence in Kenya:
The Kenyan Constitution still allows capital punishment, which has been practised for over 70 years.
There are currently more than 4,500 convicts on death row.
Kenya has no serving hangman. The last one, Kirugumi Wa Wanjiku, who served in Kamiti, died of pneumonia in Abadares in 2009. He was aged 86.
No execution has been done in Kenya since the 1987 hanging of Kenya Air Force Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka, Pancras Oteyo Okumu and two others who were found guilty of treason.
They were convicted for their involvement in the 1982 attempted coup against the government of President Daniel arap Moi.
Five main crimes that warrant capital punishment are: murder, treason, oath-taking for crimes by proscribed criminal outfits, robbery with violence and attempted robbery with violence.
Note that killing of a baby, aged 12 moths and below, by its own mother is not murder but infanticide, which attracts manslaughter convictions.
Death row convicts serve in jail, hoping for the commutation of their sentences to life by the president through the Power of Mercy.
Some convicts have even been released after serving for some years.
The power of Mercy is invoked as provided for by Article 133 of the Constitution.
Currently, there is a task force that is meant to review the death row. The court directed the office of the AG to do so after human rights groups petitioned.
Every story written about Ruth Kamande says the same thing: that she has been convicted of murder and has been crowned a beauty queen.
But what most people do not know is that Kamande is also a trained auxiliary paralegal and has used these skills to help her fellow inmates navigate the complex judicial system that often throws them into the deep end of court proceedings without a lawyer to guide them.
As a result, many are imprisoned for cases that they could easily win had they had the appropriate legal representation.
Kamande is a beneficiary of a programme run by the African Prisons Project, a charity organisation active in Kenya and Uganda, which “brings dignity and hope to prison communities in Africa” through transferring of useful skills to prisoners and prison wardens.
“I am in a good position to draft cross-examination questions, defences, submissions and even mitigations,” Kamande writes in a testimonial on the APP website. And using these skills, she has helped some inmates secure their freedom.
‘GOOD PARALEGAL’
Mr John Muthuri, the legal aid manager at APP who trained Kamande as a paralegal, has only good things to say about her.
“Ruth is a good paralegal and we are happy with her work. She has been able to build the confidence of her peers, assisting them to argue their cases successfully for bail and bond,” he told the Nation.
The APP programme currently operates in eight prisons in Kenya, and so successful has been its paralegal programme that some prisoners who have gone through it have represented themselves in court and successfully overturned previous convictions.
According to APP, although the law provides the right to a lawyer, 80 per cent of accused people who go through the court system in Kenya do so without any legal representation.
This inadvertently leads to a high rate of imprisonment.
