420 convicts on death row

By Pascal Kwesiga    
         
There are 420 currently convicts on death row in Uganda’s prisons, the Uganda Prisons Service has said.

The Spokesperson of Uganda Prisons Service, Frank Baine told New Vision online  over the weekend that the convicts on death row were sentenced to death before the 2009 famous Supreme court ruling on the constitutional court petition by Susan Kigula and 417 death row convicts in which they challenged the constitutionality of the death sentence.

The convicts said that the laws that prescribed the death sentence as the maximum punishment for capital offences contravened several constitutional articles.

They also said that the delay for the actual execution to take place after the sentence contravened provisions of the country’s supreme law, adding that the Trial on Indictments Act which provides for hanging as the legal mode of carrying out the death sentence, was cruel, inhuman and degrading and contravened the constitution.

The Supreme Court ruled that death penalty was no longer mandatory but it did not stop courts from imposing it.

Baine said that the last time Uganda killed convicts by hanging under the current regime was in 1999 when 29 death row inmates were murdered.

“This was the highest number of death row convicts to be killed under NRM.  Before these nine convicts were killed and about five had also been killed previously,” he said.

Asked about the number of death row convicts Uganda has killed since independence, Baine said “Many were killed during late President Amin’s regime and the records are not clear,”

He said that there were about 600 death row convicts in prisons before the Supreme Court ruling. “Some of them had their sentences reduced to life imprisonment after the ruling,” Baine added.

The Prisons service publicist noted that due to the Supreme Court ruling, judges were being compelled to hand down long jail terms which are more or less “death sentences”

The chairman of the General Court Martial, Brig. Fred Tolit while sentencing a UPDF soldier, Pte. Patrick Okot who killed ten people in Bomba to 90 years recently said “The convict deserves death but we are aware of the on-going global campaign to ban death sentence,” he said.

However, Tolit noted that sentencing Okot to life imprisonment which translates into 20 years would not have been enough.