Breaking News
INMATES ON DEATH ROW
Governors have the choice to commute death sentences to life in prison
The recent charge by the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, for governors to sign the death warrants of convicts on death row who have exhausted all avenues of appeal, raises serious fundamental questions about human rights in Nigeria. He made the call so that spaces could become available within the correctional facilities. The mere suggestion that human beings, regardless of their status, should be killed for the purpose of creating space for others is unconscionable. It is even more unfortunate that such a proposition is coming from Aregbesola who as Governor of Osun State for eight years never signed any death warrant.
In Nigeria today, there are no fewer than 3008 condemned criminals waiting for their date with the executioners. Without prejudice to the controversial international legal debate on death penalty, we condemn the violation of the fundamental human rights of these condemned prisoners. They have been put in limbo because state governors have refused to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment. Majority of these death row inmates are in solitary confinement having been convicted for such offences as murder, treason, treachery, and armed robbery. Some states in the country have also enacted capital punishment for those convicted of kidnappings.
As we have consistently argued on this page, governors are not bound to sign the warrants for the execution of people on death row. They can exercise their prerogative to commute such sentences to lifetime in jail. They can also grant such convicts state pardon, therefore putting a closure to the matter. Refusal to carry out any of these executive functions has created a roller coaster of emotions for these condemned inmates who have practically been reduced to the status of the living dead.
It is an inherent violation on their rights and dignity to keep people interminably on death row, especially for cases that have been concluded by the Supreme Court. Such practice is antithetical and capable of inflicting traumatic shock on the condemned inmates awaiting an imaginary death in solitary confinement. In reality, prisoners on death row are condemned to a kind of existential limbo, existing as entities in cold storage rather than living as human beings. We therefore imagine the harrowing spell condemned prisoners go through daily in solitary cells, humbled by the force of an impending death that seems to be an eternity.
Meanwhile, there is an ongoing campaign against death penalty. It is generally believed that death penalty as an aspect of a retributive justice does not solve reduction of crimes. Besides, humanists believe that death penalty violates the most fundamental human right – the right to life. According to them, it is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. The death penalty, they argue, is discriminatory. An innocent person may be released from prison for a crime they did not commit, but an execution can never be reversed. Specifically, Amnesty International holds that the death penalty breaches human rights, in particular the right to life and the right to live free from torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Both rights are protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN in 1948. And Nigeria is a signatory to the act.
Against the background that the Nigeria Correctional Service (NCS) Act provides for some mitigations, we urge Aregbesola to liaise with the judiciary on how to operationalise Section 12(2c) which states that “where an inmate sentenced to death has exhausted all legal procedures for appeal and a period of 10 years has elapsed without execution of the sentence, the Chief Judge may commute the sentence of death to life imprisonment.”
That is a better way to free up space in the prisons.
