sentence

A high court judge in Malawi has sentenced a gang who killed a man with albinism for his body parts, to life imprisonment, and recommended that they not ever be given sentence reduction by the country’s President. Judge Redson Kapindu said life imprisonment was perhaps an ‘even sterner’ punishment that the death penalty, since the prisoner had ‘only hopeless, painful years’ ahead of him, ‘… stretching out forever’.

Against the background of a sharp and disturbing rise in the rape of children in Malawi (a problem in a number of other jurisdictions as well), a prominent high court judge has delivered a decision setting a new benchmark for sentence and judicial comment in response to such crimes. His important new judgment comes as police in Malawi have released new rape statistics showing that the number of young girls raped (or ‘defiled’ in terms of Malawi’s law) is far higher than the number of adult women raped.

As the international community marks its annual 16 days of activism to end gender-based violence, judges are running out of words to describe the horrific cases of femicide that regularly come before them for trial. A case in point was recently heard by Namibia's high court and concerns the butchery of a woman by the man with whom she had been in a romantic relationship.