Uganda's constitutional court began hearing an unprecedented legal challenge...

Uganda's constitutional court began hearing an unprecedented legal challenge to capital punishment from the country's more than 400 death row inmates. The 417 prisoners contended before the country's second highest court that the death penalty -- carried out by hanging in Uganda -- amounted to cruel and degrading treatment prohibited by the constitution.
"The petition (asks the court to rule on) whether the death penalty is constitutional and a lawful punishment or whether the constitution permits it," defence lawyer John Katende told the five-judge panel.
Five of the 417 convicts, who first petitioned in September 2003 for the death penalty to be expunged from the penal code, appeared at the hearings, while the others remained at Uganda's Luzira maximum security prison.
The inmates in court shed tears when Katende offered the judges graphic descriptions of the hanging process.
The petitioners argued that capital punishment is banned by Uganda's constitution which proscribes "torture, cruel and inhuman or degrading forms of punishment."
The petition covered only capital punishment in non-military courts, where the sentence could be handed down for crimes such as treason, terrorism and murder.
Katende said the appeal was unique both in Uganda and in Africa as he maintained the petition was the first in which a country's entire death row population had challenged their sentences en masse.
The convicts had found an unlikely ally in the form of the Uganda prisons department, which since early 2003 had called for the abolition of capital punishment as it traumatizes wardens who have to look after doomed inmates.
Prison chief Joseph Etima submitted an affadavit in support of the death row inmates' appeal, according to a list of supporting documents provided by Katende.
The department recommended that the death penalty be replaced by life in prison without the possibility of parole.
However, a lawyer for the government argued the death penalty should be preserved as it was an effective deterrent and was supported by the Ugandan people.
"We represent all Ugandans who believe that people should be responsible for their mistakes," State Attorney, Benjamin Bagambe, told the court.
He said a recent study by a government-appointed constitutional review commission had found that 57.5 percent of the country's population was in favour of keeping the death penalty while only 42.5 percent wanted it abolished.
According to prison records, at least 377 people, including one woman, had been legally executed by hanging in Uganda since 1938.
Current President Yoweri Museveni's government had hanged 51 people, but none since 1999 when 28 people were executed in one day, including a prominent politician in deposed president Milton Obote's regime, Hajji Musa Ssebirumbi. Seventy-one court ordered executions were carried out under Idi Amin's 1971 to 1979 military dictatorship, although thousands more were killed extrajudicially during his rule.