Court reserves verdict on sentence against murder convict Chanthunya: Bail revoked

High Court judge Ruth Chinangwa will next Wednesday, September 2, 2020 mete out the sentence for Misozi Chanthunya, who has been found guilty of killing his Zimbabwean girlfriend Linda Gasa.

Chinangwa has since revoked the bail for Chanthunya, who committed the offence in 2010.

The High Court sitting in Zomba convicted  Chanthunya on charges of murder, perjury and concealing the dead body.

Justice Chinangwa said the State “proved beyond reasonable doubt” that  Gasa was murdered through poisoning.

She further said “circumstantial evidence” shows Chanthunya killed Gasa as he was the last person seen with deceased, who was studying at the Malawi College of Accountancy in Blantyre.

The Court understood that the convict poisoned Gasa at his family cottage in Mangochi where they had gone to iron out their differences over a pregnancy and buried her at the cottage.

Maximum sentence for murder conviction in Malawi is  death penalty, but  capital punishment has been a controversial subject in the cpuntry for a long time.

The  European Union (EU) described the death penalty as evil and urged Malawi to abolish it so that those accused should not feel rejected.

Malawi has laws that empower presidents to sign for the death penalty in murder cases. However, since attaining democracy in 1994, no president has ever signed the death penalty and in worst cases, most sentences have been commuted to life imprisonment.

In 2015, the High Court freed 25 convicts who were on death row following the court’s decision to rehear homicide cases at its Zomba District Registry through a Death Row Inmates Resentencing Project facilitated by MHRC.

The rehearing exercise followed a 2011 review of Section 210 of the Penal Code that declared mandatory imposition of death penalty unconstitutional after some people argued that they could not be on death row as Malawi did not provide the ultimate sentence.

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