Story by Peter Chivhima
After the legislative repeal of the death penalty, government is facilitating the resentencing of inmates who were on the death row.
This was revealed by the Permanent Secretary for Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Mrs Vimbai Nyemba in an exclusive interview with ZBC News in Harare this Monday.
“As government, we are supposed to sit. We are actually proposing meetings to be done before the end of this month to ensure that stakeholders, like the law, Commissioner General of the Prisons and Correctional Service, the Prosecutor General, the ministry itself. In terms of the Act, those are the three who are supposed to meet and ensure that the process goes on very fast and smoothly as well. The Judicial Service Commission is most important in the whole process. So there are a lot of other stakeholders who will be invited to this meeting so that we see how we can proceed to ensure that we have met the mandate given by the Act itself,” said Mrs Nyemba.
She also explained the procedures involved in the resentencing process.
“The position of the public executive is also automatically abolished. All those who have been sentenced to death must appear before the High Court for retrial. And this is the Act that is saying so. When the retrial process is commenced the accused persons or the courts themselves must be represented by a legal representative. Either of their choice or a legal representative who is given to them by the State from a pool of lawyers, which the State normally does,” she said.
“We call them pro-dio-metas that are run by the State with the Law Society. By the way, the Law Society is also a very important stakeholder because the lawyers themselves will be part of this process. When they appear before the court, there will be a retrial. And that retrial will look into a number of aspects, the nature of the murder committed. The circumstances behind the commission, the victims also will be consulted. And so the trial will go on. And the judge of the High Court will give a sentence. And that sentence will not be a death sentence. It could be a life imprisonment,” she added on.
More than 40 inmates were sentenced to death, with the longest-serving prisoner having spent 22 years on death row at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, while the shortest term served is less than a year.
