A revelation that there are over 3,000 Inmates on death row across Nigeria’s correctional centres is alarming. It reflects a lack of value for human dignity, and dysfunction in the criminal justice system. After conviction and passing of death sentences, the state governors, whose responsibility it is to sign death warrants, commute the sentence or pardon the convict, should stop shirking their constitutional responsibility and help decongest the custodial centres.
Generally, it is a tough task. Unlike autocracies, leaders in many democracies are reluctant to enforce the death penalty. Arguments over its rightness, effectiveness and fairness rage across the world. According to Amnesty International, by law or in practice, 112 countries have abolished the death penalty. Fifty-five countries, including Nigeria, retain the death penalty for capital offences in their statute books.
Advocates of abolition, including CSOs in Nigeria, have stepped up their campaign to scrap state-sanctioned execution. While that is ongoing however, the reality is that Nigerian law prescribes death for certain offences through the criminal justice system. The European Union Agency for Asylum lists murder, treason, assisted suicide, armed robbery, and fabricating false evidence leading to conviction to death of another person as offences attracting the death sentence in Nigeria.
Lately, death penalty for terrorism and kidnapping has been written into federal and state statutes. In the North, 12 states have adopted penal Sharia laws prescribing death sentences for certain “offences” not accepted by most of the world as crimes at all. This has strengthened the hands of anti-death penalty campaigners who view it as the ultimate violation of human rights.
State governors are therefore conflicted. But the choice is clear. Like the president, the constitution empowers them with the prerogative of mercy; they can commute death sentences to imprisonment, release convicts on death row, or pardon them outright.
The alternative is to sign the death warrants, authorising execution of convicts, especially those who had exhausted their right to appeal, and their sentences had been confirmed by the Supreme Court. Liberal democrats and the United Nations stoutly oppose that option.
Inaction solves nothing. Nigeria’s prisons are unpardonably overcrowded. The Nigerian Correctional Service website reveals that there are 81,786 inmates nationwide, but only 25,411 have been convicted; leaving 56,365, representing 68.9 per cent, awaiting trial. Prison conditions are poor; overcrowded, unhygienic, and prone to contaminable diseases. The food is poor as well.
Keeping persons sentenced to death interminably is also inhumane. There are 3,008 males and 61 females currently on death row, NCoS disclosed. NGOs say an IDR could remain in prison for more than 15 years. Statista disclosed that Nigerian courts pronounced 2,556 death sentences between 2010 and 2020.
Unlike in the United States whose 2,331 death row inmates as of December 2022 have multiple opportunities for release appeals, and regular review or clemency hearings, Nigeria’s death row inmates can only hope for reprieve from the infrequent, and ill-structured use of the mercy prerogative.
President Bola Tinubu and the Interior Minister, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, should make prison decongestion a priority. Previous functionaries promised but failed to do so. Tunji-Ojo’s recent promise to ensure the 4,000 inmates regain their freedom is a start.
Though other governors demur, a former Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, in 2016, signed one death warrant. Former Delta State Governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, pardoned three Inmates on death row following the recommendations by the state’s Advisory Council on the Prerogative of Mercy in 2014.
Tinubu and the governors should activate the mercy machinery. Thorough reviews should be taken of each IDR case, and options for clemency applied, including commutation to lesser sentences.
The awaiting trial population is scandalous; state governors and the state chief judges should take up this task with determination.
