Judge wants Kibaki to okay hanging of convicts

By Wahome Thuku

A High Court judge on Wednesday took issue with failure by President Kibaki to order the hanging of death row convicts.

Justice Mohammed Warsame took a swipe at the Head of State over his 2009 decision to commute all death sentences to life imprisonment.

Alex Chepkonga and Dickson Munene at the Milimani Law Courts. The two were found guilty of killing the son of former Assistant minister Patrick Muiruri and were sentenced to death. Photo: Ann Kamoni/Standard

"The President should sign death warrants passed by the court as failure to do so is to fail in his constitutional duty," the judge said in a candid pronouncement.

Warsame also differed with a recent Court of Appeal declaration that a death sentence was not the only available punishment for murder convicts.

He was justifying a death sentence, which he handed down to a police inspector Dickson Munene and his friend Alex Chepkonga for the murder of former Assistant Minister Patrick Muiruri’s son.

Shot thrice

The two were convicted last week for the murder of James Ng’ang’a in January 2004. Ng’ang’a, then a law lecturer in the UK, was shot by Munene three times at dawn on January 24, 2004 following a bar brawl at Crooked-Q nightclub in Westlands, Nairobi.

The judge had put the sentencing on hold last week to give the State time to prepare a victim-impact statement from the family of Muiruri, the former Gatundu North MP.

Ng’ang’a, who was in Kenya on Christmas vacation, had been drinking the night away in the company of his brother John Gachera and a woman called Jedidah Ahawa.

Chepkonga was in the company of Munene and four other men.

The two groups of youthful revellers began fighting prompting the club security guards to intervene. They threw them out and drove away in four cars.

Ng’ang’a was soon after shot dead several metres down the road.

Munene fired the shots from a pistol officially issued to him.

The Court of Appeal has recently held that a death sentence is not the only punishment that should be meted on those convicted of murder.

The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions is also on record as having stated that a death sentence is unlawful and that it does not support it. But in his contrasting opinion, Warsame said death sentence was still alive under Section 204 of the Penal Code.

"Murder is an offence under section 203 of the Penal Code and the death penalty is prescribed in a written law," Warsame said.

He said the law provided for death sentence and as a court we are under obligation to impose it.

And he vehemently defended his judgement against challenges by defence lawyer Philip Murgor saying he had arrived at it in full comprehension of the facts and the law.