The heads of prisons departments in three East African...

The heads of prisons departments in three East African countries, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, have urged authorities in the region to abolish the death sentence.
The three said death sentences and capital punishment had failed its objective of rehabilitating prisoners and reducing crimes. The worst thing, however, is that some of convicts are victims of wrongful arrest and perverted judicial procedures. And for anyone to escape this form of punishment by way of appeal is not only cumbersome, but so expensive that few of the poor souls can afford it. In any case, it takes up to 15 years to have an appeal against a death sentence heard and decided so that even if one is successful, he or she would have suffered immense physical and mental anguish.
They were speaking when the Ugandan prisons boss Joseph Etima and his Tanzanian counterpart Pius Banzi paid a courtesy call on the Kenyan prisons chief Abraham Kamakil.
Mr Kamakil said the Kenyan parliament had twice now thrown out proposals to scrap the death sentence. His Ugandan counterpart expressed concern that there was evidence some victims who had been hanged were innocent and yet the society was not willing to accept an end to the punishment. Etima and Banzi had stopped over in Nairobi en route to Burkina Faso for a conference for prison bosses in Africa to review the 1996 Kampala declaration on improving living conditions of inmates in the continent.
As the debate rages over the merits and demerits of capital punishment, prison authorities should seek ways of making the lives of the convicts on appeal more bearable, while the Judiciary should seek ways of speeding up the appeal process.
Guilty or not, every human being has rights that must be respected and protected. This is why a decision must be made on how to handle death-row inmates and ensure they are not subjected to dehumanising conditions as they await their fate.