THE Senate Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights was recently told that 49 inmates at Harare Central Prison were on death row out of 1,221 incarcerated at this penal institution.

Of the 49 condemned inmates, one has been facing the hangman’s noose for the past 13 years following his conviction on a murder charge. The death row inmates pleaded for clemency, urging the committee to lobby for the removal of the death penalty from the country’s statue books.

Many of the inmates have been on death row for at least four years while exposed to gruesome, degrading, tortuous and inhuman conditions in the prisons.

The last convicts hanged in Zimbabwe included Edgar Masendeke and Stephen Chidhumo in 2004 who had committed various crimes including murder and escaping from lawful custody at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare.

The death penalty was introduced by colonialists in Zimbabwe for political reasons. While alien to this country, its political history is dirty. Hence its continued use in post-colonial Zimbabwe is reminiscent of how colonial regimes abused it to dispose of critics and opponents.

In the first Chimurenga war (1896-7), Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi were captured and subsequently hanged by colonialists in a bid to stifle the dissenting voices of the black majority. Similarly, during Zimbabwe’s second Chimurenga, the death penalty was used both to intimidate people and eliminate nationalists and the so- called “terrorists” who were up against colonialism.

Thereafter — like Botswana which enforced the death penalty upon attaining independence in 1966 — Zimbabwe continued to apply it too after attaining independence in 1980. The two countries apply the penalty for murder, treason, an attempt on the life of head of state and military offences of mutiny and desertion in the face of the enemy.

However, research shows that the death penalty is contrary to traditional African concepts of justice and beliefs which treat human life as sacred. During the campaign against the death penalty in 2007, Zimbabwean chiefs voiced their revulsion at it. They noted that it was an alien and a colonial law contrary to traditional African concepts of justice and beliefs which treat human life as sacred.

The death penalty has been found to be tortuous, inhuman, degrading and contrary to the principles of “everyone’s right to life” as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Zimbabwe is a signatory. Those condemned to death at Harare Central Prison therefore have every right to clamour for clemency.

After all, the main purpose of a penal system is to reform the criminal offender. This purpose is defeated if the offender is killed. Also, the death penalty is final and cannot be reversed should it be found later that the condemned person was innocent.

In 1964, Britain abolished the death penalty after finding that many people had been executed following court judgments only for it to emerge later on that they were innocent. Equally, tragic mistakes have been made by the courts in Zimbabwe.

An innocent woman, Sikoluhle Kachipare — on death row at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison despite findings by Supreme Court that she should have been acquitted — was finally freed in 2001 after it was found she was not guilty. Criminal justice systems are susceptible to human error. Not all those on the death row genuinely committed crimes.

The death penalty has too often around the globe served to hide inefficiencies in the criminal justice system. It is better that 10 guilty people should escape the noose than that one innocent person is hanged.

Also from a Christian perspective, only God who created man should take away human life.

The death penalty has always weighed against the poor, as the rich can afford expensive legal representation to get them off the hook on technicalities and in Zimbabwe, only poor blacks have been sent to the gallows.

Contrary to what supporters of capital punishment claim, the penalty does not deter people from committing violent crimes. Rather, it creates an illusion that violent crime is under control and being disposed of.

Though Zimbabwe has been commuting some death penalty cases to life imprisonment — the fact that some inmates have been on death row for many years now, languishing in tiny cells while prison conditions are far below international minimum standards — capital punishment still remains an issue subject to contention.

Worldwide trends show all democracies are moving towards abolition of the death penalty and Zimbabwe should follow suit and abolish it too.

Chakanyuka is a Zimbabwean journalist and research writer. This article was originally published in The Standard