CONDEMNED TO DEATH, INMATES FOR LIFE
State governors should either sign the death warrants or commute the sentences
In recent days, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) Director General, Mojisola Adeyeye, has led the campaign for the imposition of death penalty on fake drug dealers in the country. “It is all about deterrence. If somebody kills another person and that person is not repentant, maybe that person should be killed also,” Adeyeye said while describing fake drug peddlers as “merchants of death” who prioritise profits over human lives. But even when there is hardly any week that a high court in many of the 36 states will not sentence a convict to death for one crime or another, these sentences are never carried out, calling to question whether Adeyeye’s prescription would indeed serve any purpose.
Last week, a Kano State High Court sentenced five men to death by hanging for calling a woman, Dahare Abubakar, 67, a witch and stabbing her to death. Similarly, in Ogun State, the High Court sitting in Abeokuta convicted and sentenced three people to death by hanging for killing a couple, Kehinde and Bukola Fatinoye and their son, Oreoluwa, on New Year’s Day in 2023. These convicts will join a long list of death-row inmates that populate our prisons. As of last September, no fewer than 3,590 inmates across custodial centres were on death row, according to the Nigeria Correctional Service (NCoS) spokesman Abubakar Umar.
While high courts in their states continue to sentence convicts to death, governors have refused to exercise their roles as enshrined in our Constitution. This is despite that governors are not even 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 or reduced the jail terms. The delay in carrying out this executive function is breeding congestion that has impacted significantly on the administration of justice. That is aside from the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of emotions for these condemned inmates who have practically been reduced to the status of the living dead.
The obligation on the governors is specifically enshrined in Section 212 of the 1999 Constitution as well as Section 221 of the Penal Code and Section 319 of the Criminal Code. All this prescribes capital punishment for murder while sections 37 and 38 of the Criminal Code prescribe the same punishment for treasonable felony. There is of course a global campaign against capital punishment, but it is still applicable in Nigeria. 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 kidnapping.
Against the background that the NCS Act provides for some mitigations, we urge prison authorities to liaise with the judiciary on how to operationalise Section 12(2c) which specifically provides 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.” While judges in many of the states continue to pronounce death penalty for offences like kidnapping, murder, armed robbery, etc., we cannot remember the last time any convict was executed in Nigeria.
During the 2024 World Day against the Death Penalty last October, human rights groups in Nigeria canvassed for its abolition. May be it’s time to examine their arguments.
