Zimbabwe hangman raises execution fears

Harare, Zimbabwe - In Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison on the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, there are 77 convicts who have been condemned to death by hanging.

Held in solitary confinement in cells close to the gallows, some of those condemned to death have been there for more than a decade, their appeals rejected by President Robert Mugabe.

Although the death penalty is still on the books in Zimbabwe, there have been no executions since 2004, in part because there was no hangman.

But a macabre development could potentially activate the dormant penalty. Years of unsuccessful headhunting by the country’s Justice and Legal Affairs ended last September with a sombre announcement by Justice and Legal Affairs secretary David Mangota: the government had secured a hangman who was "raring to go".

Little is known of the hangman, who is rumoured to be from Malawi. Authorities have refused to clear any interviews with him.

The announcement came as a surprise, given the ambivalence within the Zimbabwean criminal justice system about executions. Although capital punishment was codified during British rule, which ended in 1980, evolving jurisprudence and new sensitivities within Zimbabwe have limited the actual practice to the barest minimum.

The recruitment has sharply divided the government - formed between President Robert Mugabe and his rival Morgan Tsvangirai, who is now prime minister.

The Justice and Legal Affairs ministry is a shared portfolio: minister Chinamasa belongs to Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and his deputy Obert Gutu is a member of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Chinamasa says in a country with high levels of violence and regular reports of grisly rapes and murders, the perpetrators of such crimes are "worthy" of death sentences.

However, his deputy Gutu is staunchly opposed to the recruitment.

"It's bizarre and odious in the extreme," the deputy minister said. "Whoever sanctioned the hiring of a hangman at this juncture of Zimbabwe's jurisprudential history is obviously of unsound mind. For how else can you describe such an absurd decision to engage the services of a hangman when the draft constitution has made it quite apparent that the death penalty is on its way out?

Gutu added that there will not be any executions taking place in the near future.

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Source: Aljazeera, March 30, 2013

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