The news that Kenya’s most beautiful prisoner would be hanged spread like wild fire after the ruling was made on Thursday.
Ruth Kamande commonly known as Miss Lang’ata was handed the maximum death penalty for stabbing her boyfriend 25 times in 2015.
Kamande, 24, admitted to stabbing her boyfriend earlier this year after the deceased tried to kill her after she discovered he was HIV-positive. “Farid told me that he would rather kill me and himself than have his status exposed. l stabbed him severally using a kitchen knife, which fell on my chest from his hands after I overpowered him after putting my two thumbs in his eyes to save my life,” Kamande said.
The prison beauty queen has been in custody since then and was sentenced on Thursday by Justice Jessie Lesiit who said Kamande acted on purpose.
She is expected to appeal the sentence within 14 days. But one question remains unanswered, does Kenya have a hangman to take charge of such criminals?
If not, why is she being sentenced to death if there will be nobody to do the job? The man who was Kenya’s last and longest serving hangman at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison died in 2009. Kirugumi wa Wanjuki, died in a small village on the slopes of the cold Aberdare Ranges after what was suspected to be a pneumonia attack.
No executions have been carried out in Kenya since 1987 when Kenya Air Force senior private official Hezekiah Ochuka and Pancras Oteyo Okumu were hanged for treason. After trying to overthrow retired President Daniel Moi in 1982, Ochuka, Okumu and two other masterminds were sentenced to death and hanged.
They were the last people executed in Kenya to date.
And this has left death row convicts to wait for the never-arriving hangman indefinitely with the President occasionally commuting their sentences to life imprisonment.
In 2016, President Uhuru Kenyatta signed commutation documents turning all death sentences into life jail terms. Invoking the Power of Mercy provided by Article 133 of the Constitution, Uhuru also signed a pardon warrant and released 102 long-term convicts.
Following the signing at State House, Nairobi, some 2,747 Death Row convicts will now serve life imprisonment — 2,655 males and 92 females.
Although the death penalty was initially only a reserve for the convicts of murder offence, today, four offences result in the maximum penalty: murder and attempted murder, treason, oathing for crimes by proscribed criminal outfits, robbery with violence and attempted robbery with violence.
In 2017, the Supreme Court made a landmark ruling on death sentence saying that the mandatory penalty was unconstitutional.
Justice Njoki Ndung’u said the section “is out of sync and cannot stand as it is inconsistent with the constitution”.
The court made the landmark ruling after a petition by two death row convicts Francis Murwatetu and Wilson Thrombus. Following the ruling, the Office of the Attorney General said that the Supreme Court of Kenya did not abolish the death sentence in December 2017 but rather gave courts the discretion of sentencing similar cases on an individual basis.
The AG formed a task force on the review of the death penalty as directed by the court. Last month, the AG’s office said that the task force will give its report by December this year.
But we will have to wait for some time to really know if Ruth Kamande will be hanged. And by the way, is taking another life really justice?