Criminals’ paradise Uganda: Rape, murder and get rewarded with 6 years

Every village has its fair share of losers – loafers who simply idle around the place, sipping millet brew, Nubian Gin or some other such stroppy liquor and doing basically nothing else. And while they are at it, they are usually cooking up some kind of mischief.

They recognise work from a mile away…and steer right clear of it, with all gladness. But they are on the constant look-out for a classy dame, any day of the week, to take advantage of. We are talking about chaps who are good examples of bad people; exactly the type that if they died early, society would be much better off.

The disturbing thing about all this is that for some reason, such bad boys seem to present a rather irresistible sexual appeal to women – especially the more decent women. The more rogue-like the man looks like, the stronger the appeal to the best among the ladybirds. Strange but true.

Little wonder, therefore, that a really decent woman in a village in Busoga Sub-region ended up living with such a one. She was a single mother of two girls and a boy from a previous marriage that had inexplicably and irredeemably gone south. There wasn’t to be anything like ‘happily ever after’. On a day she was away, the man used the opportunity to defile both of the girls. How old were they? Well, all of 10 or 11 for one, and eight or nine for the other. Clearly, a lot of years, as far as he could see!

Trouble brewed when the little boy – about 12 years – found him defiling his sisters. The man took care of the very small matter…by strangling the boy to death. He was starting to strangle even one of the sisters, when the neighbours, disturbed by the ruckus coming from the house, intervened. They grabbed him and invited the police to show him some love.

When he was remanded, he was quick to enrol for the plea bargain opportunity at High Court, Jinja. Everything was going very well and he was about to get 35 years in jail. But just then, the prisons officers, as a ‘by the way’ in the corridors, told the State Attorney that the remandee had a previous conviction of rape and murder.

A previous plea bargain opportunity had given him all of nine years in jail. So he had served six and gone back home. The State Attorney had no record of this. When the judge learnt of that, they immediately froze the plea bargain, on the grounds that this was clearly a case that merited the death penalty. And I would have had trouble believing the story had I not heard it from the horse’s own mouth – the really nice presiding judge.

Here is the problem: crimes move along a continuum. Nobody wakes up one morning to rape and murder. That is a level reached after a series of lesser offences; the daring simply grows with time. Problem with the Uganda criminal legal process is that it is digitally backward; we do not keep a record of offenders. You can, therefore, keep committing crimes and at each trial, you get a lenient sentence because every State Attorney will tell the court: “we have no previous record of the convict; he is a first offender”.

The result is that hard core criminals get short prison terms, then behave nicely in prison, which helps them get out early (remission) after serving two-thirds of their sentences. Then they come back to society and commit more crimes.

If the court had had a previous record of this beast, they wouldn’t have rewarded him with just nine years for two of the most grievous offences in any part of the world: rape and murder. And if he had been punished appropriately – death sentence in that case – he wouldn’t have come back to defile two sisters and kill their brother.

A State keen on checking crime must build a robust institutional framework to underwrite the criminal legal process. Part of this must be a database of suspects and offenders that can be accessed by the justice, law and order sector anywhere in Uganda in a matter of seconds.

Until we do that, Uganda remains a criminals’ paradise; a place where you can commit crime, safely.

Mr Tegulle is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda     [email protected]