ANALYSIS OF THE DEATH PENALTY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS ON THE RIGHT TO LIFE IN UGANDA.
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Date
2024-07-24
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King Ceasor University, Institutional Repository
Abstract
The philosophy of the death penalty also known as capital punishment in Uganda can be traced from the development of criminal law in England. Just like other laws, criminal law in Uganda was put in place during the colonial period with the reception clause of 1902. During the government of Amin, the death penalty as a form of capital punishment was given for offenses like overcharging, hoarding, smuggling, corruption, fraud, and illegal currency sales. This led to many people being executed and these killings also left many psychologically traumatized, abandoned, lonely, and insecure, and others having a permanent sense of fear. Between the periods of 1980- 85 Milton Obote. Differences and a clash of parties mainly UPC and DP led to the arbitral killings of the time resulting in too many people losing their lives. Under the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government, the death penalty as a capital punishment was killed. During this period there were a lot of extrajudicial executions by the military. Men who kill innocent people and the state at that time didn’t exert enough to protect these people that were innocently executed. On 20th April 1999, 28 prisoners were on death row, in 2009 they were 637 on death row, in 2006 566 in mates on death row as per the Uganda Prisons Spokesman at the Luzira prisons This shows that there was a violation of rights as per Article 22(1) of the constitution which provides that " no person shall be deprived of life intentionally except in execution of a sentence passed on a fair trial by a court. In Uganda, the 1995 Constitution of Uganda
and the penal code still provide for the death penalty as a punishment. This calls for the total abolition of the death penalty because it violates the fundamental right to life meaning that even the state has no right to take the life of a person.