DEATH PENALTY

The ‘Hidden’ Third Parties as Victims
the other, this can cause a feud among the children, as to whether or
not to defend the living parent to save him or her from death row.
In some cases, children are coached and may lie in court, an act the
children may come to regret, feeling they were used. In other cases,
evidence presented at mitigation to help the parent survive the death
penalty may be humiliating to the children because such information
may be details of traumatic stories concerning the family, and the
children will have to deal with consequence of such information
when it goes to the public.
Upon sentencing, some children may not know what happens after a
death sentence has been given to their parent. Some assume that the
parent will be executed immediately, yet this may take many years
pending appeals or because an execution order has not been signed
or because there is a moratorium on executions.
Following a 2009 Uganda Supreme Court ruling on the Constitutional
Court petition by Susan Kigula, it is no longer mandatory for
anyone convicted of a capital offence to be sentenced to death. The
last time convicts were killed by hanging in Uganda was in 1999.
Since that time, the president has not signed for the execution of
anyone on death row. Meanwhile in the local communities, the message
is different, from what they have always known and what the
media reports, it’s believed that whoever is handed a death sentence
would be hanged the next day. Many people are considered dead by
family members although they are still alive, and the impact of this
is placed on the children who are now being called “orphans” and
given a name like child of the person who died in prison.
As Wells of Hope Uganda, in 2013 we visited 37 families of prisoners
in Uganda; of these 21 were families of prisoners of death row. Thirteen
families with people on death row thought that the relative on death
row had died, and when we visit such families, it’s like a resurrection,
because we inform them that the parent on death row whom they had
already declared dead is alive. For example, we took Brenda, 16, to see
her father on death row; she had lived for eight years thinking he was
dead. She said that although she was alive, she was a walking dead body
and that she was resurrected the day she saw her father in prison.
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