PAPUA NEW GUINEA. DEATH PENALTY COMMUTED FOR THREE CONVICTED OF MURDER

the Waigani Supreme Court, Papua New Guinea, commuted into life imprisonment the penalties of three men from the country’s West New Britain province.
Steven Loke Ume, Charles Patrick Kaona, and Greg Wawa Kavoa had been sentenced to death for murder by the Kimbe National Court in 1997.
Then National Court trial judge Justice Robert Woods, retired, had convicted the men on 7 February of that year for what he described as the "horrendous" wilful murder of one Agnes Bonovo, the mother of a man they were seeking in a revenge attack following a previous killing. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Justice Woods had erred in his sentencing discretion on the erroneous assumption that he was required by law to impose the death penalty.
The court, however, agreed with Justice Woods that the killing "must be seen as the most horrendous crime, there are no words to really express the disgust and horror of such and the abduction and vicious murder of what was an innocent woman".