While there are those around the world who saw the sentence and its carrying out as just comeuppance for a man who was a reviled dictator, his hands dripping with blood, the majority opinion was disgusted at the sheer cruelty of the act. It is true that we have not in Kenya had any legal hangings since 1987 ,but we have in the last seven years sentenced an increasing number of convicted felons to death.

The Daily Nation, Wednesday 18th April, reports

from 1963 to 1987 alone, 280 people (out of 3,584 sentenced to death) had been executed. ......Records from the Kenya Prisons Headquarters of September 2006 indicate that 3,741 people were sentenced to death between 2001 and 2005. There were 728 in 2001, 865 in 2002, 787 in 2003, 617 in 2004 and 744 in 2005.

Clearly, either Kenyan judges are readier to sentence convicts to death now than they were before, or the rate of conviction and perhaps commission of crimes punishable by death has increased drastically. This is one of the factors Parliament will have to consider if it is to consider repealing the legal provisions that permit the death sentence in Kenya. following the presentation of a report by the Kenya Human Rights Commission.

There is a worldwide movement against the death penalty with most nations favouring a permanent excision of such laws on the grounds that they are archaic, cruel and often unjust. Ought Kenya to follow suit?