The Committee was Friday at Kamiti Maximum Prison conducting interviews and sensitizing inmates on their mandate and the threshold one has to meet to receive a presidential pardon/MOSES MUOKI
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 29- The Power of Mercy Advisory Committee has started reviewing and conducting interviews for more than 2,400 applications by inmates who want President Uhuru Kenyatta to pardon them.
The Committee was Friday at Kamiti Maximum Prison conducting interviews and sensitizing inmates on their mandate and the threshold one has to meet to receive a presidential pardon.
Addressing inmates, the Committee Vice Chairperson Janet Kirui insisted that only deserving prisoners will pass the test whose focus ranges from age, circumstances, nature, and seriousness of the offence one committed, period served among other things.
“We don’t make a decision alone. We come later after the corrective process has gone through and when the inmate has been qualified by the prison have gone through the correction and is now a positive person, harmless to the community, equipped and ready to integrate with the rest of the society,” she asserted.
One of the convicts, Jackson Kinyua, has called upon Attorney General Paul Kihara to support re-sentencing of inmates on death row as well as those serving life imprisonments.
Also in their list of demands, the inmates want Parliament to legislate a new law defining life imprisonment as opposed to its current open-ended nature.
“There is no need to reform someone and there is no way out,” Kinyua, an inmate for 21 years at Kamiti said.
He was jailed at the age of 19 years.
“I do not know how it is to have a wife and children. All we need is a second chance,” he said.
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