“Hanging a person is not a deterrent... That is why I petitioned against the death penalty,” said Susan Kigula, upon her successful challenge in the famous Ugandan case of Susan Kigula and 416 Others vs Attorney General, Constitutional Petition No. 6 of 2003.

Ms Kigula, a Ugandan who had been on death row after the courts found her guilty of murdering her husband, starred in a landmark case in the country’s jurisprudence on the death penalty as an automatic sentence for capital offenders.

Her successful appeal resulted in her death sentence being commuted to life.

The initial petition was disposed of in June 2005 with the Constitutional Court ruling that though the death penalty was constitutional as the Attorney General had argued, keeping the condemned waiting for execution of the sentence for many years was degrading and inhuman treatment and subjected them to torture.

The court ruled that any death sentences not executed within three years automatically commutes to life imprisonment. It also ordered the files of the 417 applicants be returned to the judges that had passed the sentences for re-assessment.

As a result, many convicts overnight literary saw the noose that had agonisingly hung over their heads for years retreat, within the first few years a lot were released after courts calculated they had already served longer than 20 years, the calculation for a life sentence at the time.

Many continued to leave prison and attempt to return to normal life even as the Attorney General appealed the ruling. The final verdict was given in 2009, more or less upholding the ruling of the trial court.

Since the ruling in what is commonly referred to as the Susan Kigula case, courts have been reluctant to handout the death penalty choosing instead to exercise the freedom granted by the ruling to hand out long jail terms. Also the number of death row convicts has significantly reduced.