Death Penalty: Juveniles call for total abolition

The duo – Monday Prosper and Sopurichi Obed made the call yesterday, when they were freed from prison having spent 11 years in Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, eight of which were spent on death row.Monday  Prosper was barely 18 years in 2003 when he was charged with armed robbery in Benin City for forcefully collecting […]

The duo – Monday Prosper and Sopurichi Obed made the call yesterday, when they were freed from prison having spent 11 years in Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison, eight of which were spent on death row.
Monday  Prosper was barely 18 years in 2003 when he was charged with armed robbery in Benin City for forcefully collecting his salary from his employer. He was a private driver to an industrialist who refused to pay his salary for three months. As his employer collected money from a bank, Mr. Monday threw sand in his face, took the bag of money and counted out his salary. He was arrested by the police and charged with armed robbery, convicted and sentenced to death in 2006 by Edo State High Court. Prosper waited for the hangman for eight years in great trauma, especially with Governor Oshiemohle’s resumed executions last year. But it was not to be, as the Court of Appeal Benin City division had overturned his conviction and sentence.
Their Lordships said the evidence was ‘spurious’ and the prosecution’s case was too weak for a conviction for armed robbery. But Monday, now 30, faces the world in hopelessness without skills to get a job. As he walked out of the prison walls, he joined millions of people opposing the death penalty.
“ It is time to abolish the death penalty. Many of my friends in CC (condemned cell) in Kirikiri are innocent. I know that as a fact. It is true”, said Sopurichi Obed, another exonerated juvenile who was acquitted and released by the appeal court in Lagos in February 2014 after a decade on death row.

Like Mr. Monday and Mr. Obed, the Legal Defence & Assistance Project (LEDAP), a legal services NGO, has in the last decade litigated over 210 cases of persons charged with capital offences or convicted and sentenced to death. In nearly two thirds of the time, the charges were dismissed or convictions quashed, either for lack of credible evidence or on technical grounds. Most of the charges were armed robbery, and 95% of them were based on confessional statements of the defendants to the police, which in almost all cases the defendants would at the trial court deny their voluntariness or totally recant the confessions.
A 2010 report on death penalty cases in Nigeria published by LEDAP showed that 36% of convictions and sentences to death over 10 years period between 1999 and 2009 were overturned by the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court, indicating a very high rate of wrongful convictions.
 “The dangers of continued use of the death penalty are so grim to be ignored or avoided for political or religious reasons. Death sentence is dangerous to the society. It wrongly teaches that revenge is good justice, when indeed, it promotes sinister circle of violence and bloodshed. There is always a high likelihood that innocent persons may be sentenced and executed, as indeed many who had been executed in the past had pleaded of their innocence till they were done with the hangman or the firing squad.

“Death sentence does not deter criminality. Severity or harshness of the punishment is not a solution to crime. What deters potential criminals is not the extreme sentence for the offence, but the possibility of being caught and prosecuted.
“This is demonstrated in many states in the south-east and south-south regions that introduced death sentence as punishment for the offence of kidnapping. Despite this severe punishment, the offence was still on the rise.
“As the world today reminds all the 51 retention nations including Nigeria of the dangers of continued use of the death penalty, LEDAP and hundreds of exonerated ex-death row prisoners call on Nigeria’s National Assembly, and States Houses of Assembly to review their criminal code and the penal code laws to replace the punishment of death sentences with life imprisonment or other term of years. Such alternative humane punishments are the universally accepted norm, and Nigeria must join other democracies to say ‘yes to life’ and ‘no to state murder’.
 “When the government kills, it motivates citizens to belittle life and to wrongly pursue revenge as justice,” the group said in a statement.