A 2016 Amnesty International report on Executions and Death Sentences has indicated Malawi last year had 28 people on death row compared to 44 in 2015.<\/p>\n
The report covered the judicial use of death penalty for the period of January to December last year collected from a variety of sources including official figures.<\/p>\n
The report, which was released on Tuesday, shows that only one person was condemned to death in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cMalawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe were the only countries in Southern Africa who handed down death sentences in 2016 \u2013 a total of 110, the overwhelming majority of which (101) were in Zambia,\u201d reads a press release accompanying the report.<\/p>\n
The Centre for Human Rights Education, Advice and Assistance Executive Director Victor Mhango has attributed the drop in number of death sentences to the Kafantayeni Sentence Rehearing Project which was initiated in 2014.<\/p>\n
\u201cKafantayeni sentence rehearing has helped to reduce the number of people on death row. Previously, a suspect found guilty of a capital offence automatically faced the death penalty, but the Kafantayeni ruling has given judges a leeway to assess cases and give out other stiffer punishments besides the death penalty,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Mhango further said the reduction calls for more efforts with authorities to deal away with the death penalty in Malawi.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurrently, we can say we don\u2019t have the death penalty in our country because it has never been applied since the one party era. So at the rate the issue is going, there is need to keep lobbying in order for us to do away with this law,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Among others, Benin and Guinea are the only two countries known to have abolished the death sentence for all crimes, according to the report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A 2016 Amnesty International report on Executions and Death Sentences has indicated Malawi last year had 28 people on death row compared to 44 in 2015. The report covered the judicial use of death penalty for the period of January to December last year collected from a variety of sources including official figures. The report, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":44298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44299,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44293\/revisions\/44299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}