15 Death-Row Inmates Want Sentence Outlawed, Case At ConCourt This Week

A GROUP of 15 death-row inmates with the support of a local rights lobby group Veritas have approached the Constitutional Court (ConCourt) seeking stay of execution and the scrapping of the death penalty from the country’s books.

According to a statement by Veritas the applicants in the case were all sentenced to death for murder in separate trials that took place between four and 20 years ago.

“On Wednesday 28th October the Constitutional Court is due to hear an important case, Chariwa and 14 Others vs Minister of Justice (Emmerson Mnangagwa) and Others (CCZ 47/2015), in which 15 prisoners who are languishing on ‘death row’ are seeking a stay of execution.

The group said the Constitution protects all citizens including prisoners.

“They (inmates) argue that they have been kept there so long that it would be unconstitutional to execute them now – unconscionable might be a better word – for the following reasons: Section 53 of the Constitution protects everyone, including convicted prisoners, against torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

“The lengthy periods they have spent in prison awaiting execution, never knowing from one day to the next when they would be hanged [because death-row prisoners are not told in advance of the date and time of their execution] amounts to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,” the prisoners will argue.

“Therefore, the applicants argue, they cannot now be executed and the Constitutional Court should commute their sentences to life imprisonment.

“The applicants rely on judgments of the Supreme Court which laid down as long ago as 1993 that it was cruel, inhuman and degrading to keep prisoners under sentence of death waiting for long periods for their sentences to be carried out.”

Mnangagwa survived the death penalty during the Rhodesian era after being deemed too young to be hanged.

The Vice-President has become a fervent supporter of the lobby against the death penalty and claims he has averted many an execution during his time as Justice Minister albeit intermittently over the past 35 years. source-newzimbabwe