In Uganda, Capital Punishment Sparks Anguish on Both Sides of the Prison Bars

KAMPALA, Uganda — It is rare that the commissioner of prisons disagrees with the president. But Johnson Byabashaija adamantly opposes capital punishment and thinks at least some of the more than 500 death row inmates here are innocent.Even so, if President Museveni orders him to execute one of those prisoners, the commissioner said he will obey.“If Museveni directs, we shall carry an order out. It’s our obligation,” Mr. Byabashaija said with resignation, adding that he hopes those orders never come.Though there were three military executions in 2003, Uganda hasn’t put a civilian to death since 1999. In that year, 28 people were hanged at Luzira Prison. But despite the unofficial moratorium, death sentences continue to be handed down, and the nation remains on Amnesty International’s list of death penalty practitioners.Across the African continent, capital punishment is becoming increasingly unpopular. In nearby Tanzania, despite the fact that no law has officially abolished the death penalty President Kikwete hasn’t executed anyone since 1994 and in August of this year, he commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment.And though there are reports of extrajudicial killings in Rwanda’s prisons, that country’s Parliament officially outlawed the death penalty in June. Neighboring Kenya hasn’t executed anyone since 1986, though a recent push to abolish capital punishment could have the opposite effect and expedite executions.“Nobody has the right to take away life. With the death penalty, the government is taking away life,” said Mr. Byabashaija, a decorated prisons-officer who has served in the Ugandan government as a civil servant since he received his veterinary degree in 1982. He began his career by supervising animals kept by the prison system and then raised money for prisons through the system’s poultry farm, which led to regular promotions until he was appointed commissioner in 2005.“Our criminal justice system is not foolproof. There is the danger of an innocent person being wrongfully convicted, and you cannot reverse that,” Mr. Byabashaija said. “We are a Third World country. We are understaffed. How many policemen are available? The raw number of crimes overwhelms the police officers and compromises the quality of investigation.”Still, despite his opposition to the death penalty, Mr. Byabashaija told The New York Sun: “Death is not a punishment. Everyone shall die anyway.”At least one person would disagree with him.“I’m Susan Kigula, a death row inmate. I’ve served seven years. They allege that I killed my late husband with my housegirl,” Ms. Kigula said, calm and measured, concerned with her own fate and that of her housegirl, or maid, who supposedly assisted her in brutally murdering her husband. She has told the story many times — always with the insistence that she is innocent, pointing out the fact that the key testimony against her came from a child who was only 3 years old at the time of the alleged crime.“The justice system makes mistakes because it is comprised of human beings, who are bound to make mistakes. No one is perfect,” she said.Based on her conversations with other death row prisoners, Ms. Kigula estimates that only 60% of the people sentenced to die here actually committed the crimes for which they were convicted. The rest, she said, are victims of a broken legal system.In a 2006 report titled “Uganda: Challenging the Death Penalty,” the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative found that nearly 90% of the country’s death row inmates have little or no command of the English language, which is used in all court proceedings. Thus, suspects often are often unable to follow their own trials or even to understand the charges against them.Additionally, 94% of inmates were found to be from lower economic classes, and 90% of the crimes were found to have been committed outside Kampala in rural areas where police departments are understaffed and underfunded.All of these factors diminish a suspect’s chances for a fair trial, said Livingstone Sewanyana, the director of FHRI, a Ugandan nongovernmental organization focusing on legal rights issues.In Ms. Kigula’s case, these issues don’t apply: She is a rarity among inmates in that she speaks very good English and was educated through the equivalent of high school — an uncommon level of education among the mainly illiterate prisoners.However, she still insists her trial was unfair, which is why she is now the lead in Uganda’s first class action lawsuit challenging the death penalty: Kigula and 416 others vs. the Attorney General of Uganda.Filed in 2003, the case has been stalled in the courts since 2005.While the law firm of Katende, Ssempebwa, and Company initially won on two counts in the Constitutional Court — securing a ruling that ended mandatory death sentences for specific categories of crime and that stopped sentences from being delayed more than three years — the firm on two other counts. The court ruled that the death penalty was indeed constitutional and that hanging was not a cruel and inhumane method of execution.The defense appealed, and Uganda’s attorney general counterappealed.Now, the case is currently waiting to be heard in the Supreme Court, which has been two judges short of a quorum since one of the justices passed away in June 2006. The court is waiting on President Museveni to approve the appointments of other judges.Though Amnesty International declined to comment specifically on the Kigula case, they did agree that the courts are the best way to challenge the death penalty. “For the death penalty to go off the books, we have to have the Cabinet and Parliament to agree,” an Amnesty International researcher for East Africa, Godfrey Odongo, said. “That is where we need change, and that is where Amnesty International concentrates its action.”Meanwhile, Ms. Kigula is just glad so many people are working on her case. But, she said, she doesn’t blame anyone for her time in jail — she just prays that she will soon be released. “One day in prison is a thousand years,” Ms. Kigula said, tears dripping down her cheeks and falling on the red-and-white gingham of her prison uniform.Susan Kigula’s life will be spared as long as her case is held up in the courts, a fact that makes Mr. Byabashaija glad that no announcement will be posted on the board at the main prison gate any time soon.“In 1999,” when the last civilian executions were carried out, “the notice said it will be at such and such a time,” Mr. Byabashaija said. “It is not comfortable. Me, I’ve never seen an execution being carried out,” he added, since it is not one of his duties as commissioner to witness the executions. “I shiver at the prospect.”But Ms. Kigula’s mental anguish is directly related to the timelessness of her sentence and the interminable waiting. “My relatives have abandoned me. They got tired of waiting,” she said. “If they sentenced me to some number of years, they have hope you’re coming out, but if you’re sentenced to death, you are left on your own with God.”

In Uganda, Capital Punishment Sparks Anguish on Both Sides of the Prison Bars

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