New report on the death penalty in Kenya launched

On 24 January 2023, the Death Penalty Research Unit's (DPRU) partner organisation The Death Penalty Project (The DPP) launched a new research report on the death penalty in Kenya in collaboration with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The report, titled Living with a Death Sentence in Kenya: Prisoners’ Experiences of Crime, Punishment and Death Row, was authored by DPRU Director Professor Carolyn Hoyle and DPhil student Lucrezia Rizzelli.

Living with a Death Sentence in Kenya focuses on prisoners’ socio-economic backgrounds and profiles, their pathways to, and motivation for, offending, as well as their experiences of the criminal justice process and of imprisonment. This report complements The DPP’s previous two-part study of attitudes to the death penalty in Kenya among the public and opinion leaders.

The new report was formally launched in Nairobi, Kenya, on 24 January. It received widespread media coverage, including from the following outlets:

·       News articles available online: The Star, The Standard, Capital News, KBC, Kenya Times, Kenya News Agency, NTV Kenya

·       TV/video coverage: K24TV, The Informer, KTN News, Citizen TV Kenya

·       Print-only: The Nairobian

The findings of the report were also summarised in an article on The Conversation by Carolyn Hoyle and The DPP’s Parvais Jabbar, ‘Kenyan prisoners on death row weren’t deterred by the threat of the death penalty: new research findings’, as well as in an op-ed in The Star newspaper which is available to read here.

Living with a Death Sentence in Kenya: Prisoners’ Experiences of Crime, Punishment and Death Row can be read in full (88 pp) on The Death Penalty Project website here.