High Court judge Wilson Masalu Musene has declined to reduce a death death penalty given by the High Court judge BKK Onega to 39 year old Francis Mwanga after convicting him of murder.
Justice Musene maintained that Mwanga must be hanged for the murder of 5 year old Shamim Muhammad on the Easter of April 1999.
Mwanga was among the 147 death row inmates whom the Supreme Court ordered to have their death sentences mitigated before the High Court after the state had delayed execution of their death penalities.
While re-condemning Mwanga to suffer death this morning, Justice Musene observed that even though he has spent 17 years on the death row, he does not deserve any mercy since he well knowingly led an innocent child to the slaughter house due to his selfish motive of getting rich.
“Death punishment is only deserved in only the rare of the rarest cases. This is the worst of the worst cases because it involved barbaric and inhumane acts against innocent children,” Judge Musene pronounced.
He emphasized that all Ugandan children must be protected from such crude, cruel, torturous and barbaric acts of ritual sacrifice.
Evidence on court record shows that on July 4 1999 at Njeru Town Council in Mukono district, Mwanga lured a young Shamim into buying her eats but instead led her to the shrine of his family witch doctor; Younous Samanya.
The witch doctor had convinced Mwanga that sacrificing a girl child would cleanse him of bad spirits that had bound him into poverty. Samanya is then said to have cut cut off the girl’s head, ears, tongue, private parts, fingers and buried her head in an anthill.
That Mwanga, a charcoal seller by then was spotted by eye witnesses to have been the last person seen with the toddler. Upon arrest, he had confessed to the crime and led police at the said anthill where Shamim’s head was recovered.