Lawyer Advocates For Abolition Of Death Penalty

Constitutional Lawyer and a Lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), John Darko is advocating for the scrapping of the death penalty from Ghana’s laws.

According to him, the sentence has lost its usefulness and therefore it will be best to do away with it. His comments comes on the back of a Deputy Attorney General-designate Alfred Tuah Yeboah who has opposed calls for the abolishment of the death penalty from Ghana’s statutes.

He made the call when he appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Tuesday, June 15, 2021.

In an interview with Ohene Addo on Plan B Fm ‘Nkosuo Nsem’, the lawyer said even though Ghana has not executed any convict in the last 26 years, it’s still needs to be expunged from our laws.

“I don’t subscribe to it even though currently it is the state of the law and I think that for the purposes of reform, and also so we can be known to the committee of civilized nations where across the world it has been agreed that this is the most extreme, I think it is a progressive recommendation for legislative change”

“Research has shown that, Death penalty has not clamp down on crime in the country. We are still witnessing heinous crimes every day, therefore, I think we need to do away with the death penalty. It has been in our books since 1992 and it has not helped us in any way. We need to remove it from our books because we have not enforced it” he opined.

The private legal practitioner also said, in instances where a convict is executed and it is found later that the judgment was erroneous, the victim cannot be brought back to life but if other forms of punishment are imposed, the victim can at least be compensated should it be found that the judgment was wrong.

The last time Ghana carried out an execution was in 1993. In Ghana, the Constitution and Criminal Code list treason, murder, genocide, war, smuggling and other crimes as punishable by death.

The Constitution states that individuals who commit such crimes against the constitutional order “shall, upon conviction, be sentenced to suffer death”

Even though Ghana has not recorded any execution by the death penalty since 1993, the number of death sentences has increased from nine in 2014 to 18 in 2015.

As of December 31, 2018, there were 172 people, including three women, on the death row in Ghana.