The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Parliament has passed the Law Revision (penalties in criminal matters) Miscellaneous Amendment Bill 2015 effectively scrapping the mandatory death sentence.
The bill sought to amend the Penal Code Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF) Act, and the Trial on Indictment Act by scrapping all references to the mandatory death penalty and restrict its application to most serious crimes.
Following the approval of the bill, judges will have the discretion to impose the death sentence depending on the circumstances and offences committed. The MPs replaced death sentence with life sentence and mandatory death sentence with discretionary sentence.
Medard Ssegona, the Busiro East MP, says the new law allows court to listen to mitigating factors and look at the entire set of circumstances surrounding the offence committed.
Veronica Eragu Bichetero, the Vice Chair of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, which scrutinized the bill, says judges will no longer be compelled to hand out a death sentenced to anybody as it was in the penal code.
Eragu says the new law has absolved judges who could see the law floating but couldn’t do anything other than sentence the convicts to death.
In Uganda, the death penalty is imposed pursuant to Article 22 of the Constitution, which says no person shall be deprived of life intentionally except in execution of a sentence passed in a fair trial by a court of competent jurisdiction in respect of a criminal offence under the laws of Uganda and the conviction and sentence have been confirmed by the highest appellate court.
There are at least 480 death row inmates in the country. The last civilian executions were in 1999 and 2006 for the military.
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