Zimpapers Logo

In many ways, the retention of the death penalty in Zimbabwe is an anachronism and for all practical purposes we have a moratorium on hanging, with no executions for more than a decade and constitutionally we no longer recognise any crime, including murder, where the judge must impose the penalty although it is an option for adult men under 70 who commit aggravated murder.
In our retreat from the death penalty and since independence we have retreated a long way, we are moving with the majority of Africans. In our own region, SADC, six countries have now formally abolished the death penalty: Angola, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. With one exception the rest of us have not executed anyone for more than a decade; only Botswana has done so.

In the rest of Africa only eight other countries have seen an execution in the last decade, almost all of them in north-east Africa. The rest have either abolished the death penalty or have a formal or informal moratorium in place.

Now Zimbabwe is facing some practical problems, with three of our five neighbours having formally abolished the death penalty and Zambia, like us, having an informal moratorium. Some of our killers are hopping across the border and even when our neighbours catch them and really want to send them back to us for trial, there are legal problems because we still retain the option of hanging for adult men convicted of murder.

The need to be able to assure an abolitionist neighbour that we will not sentence a returned criminal to death is now the subject of an application before the courts. It is obviously not an easy decision and whichever way it goes it will create different categories of killers. In any case we already have two categories since women and old men who kill can no longer be sentenced to death.

Since independence it has not been easy to hang anyone, even when we had a mandatory death sentence for murder. The accused has to have a lawyer at his trial, an appeal is compulsory, the sentence has to be confirmed by the Cabinet and the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs has to sign the final warrant. It is clear that a majority of the Cabinet are not willing, on ethical grounds, to approve an execution and the present Justice Minister, Cde Emmerson Mnangagwa, has made it clear he will refuse to sign warrants, again on ethical grounds.

This does not mean that those who are not hanged are allowed out of prison to wander around. We keep them locked up and it looks like the Government is quite happy for them to be locked up for life.

Our murder rates have not changed and are still very low. Research around the world recognises that the deterrent for murder is not a death penalty, rather it is a near certainty of being caught followed by a serious penalty. Our police make that arrest following a killing a near certainty. So on practical grounds again there is no need to retain hanging.

We think the time has now come to start formalising what amounts to near abolition of the death penalty and get rid of it, on both ethical and practical grounds.
The opportunity arises when Parliament is asked to amend the relevant law to bring it in line with the Constitution. We would like to see a sentence of “life without parole” formally defined at least as an option and perhaps made mandatory for aggravated murder.

The Constitution just lays down the conditions for a death penalty; we can impose a lower punishment.
This change would retain a very powerful deterrent and would not be strongly opposed, we think, by those who still support the death penalty; the alternative to hanging still removes a killer permanently from society and still imposes drastic punishment.

And that punishment will be the same for all who commit the most brutal killings, whether they are men or women, or whether they have managed to flee to a country that has abolished the death penalty or whether they were caught at home.

But as a society we will not longer ourselves kill anyone, in effect lowering ourselves to the level of the killers we punish.