Ghana vice president death penalty

Parliament has passed the Criminal Offences Amendment Bill into law, abolishing the death penalty from the statute books. The overarching objective of the new law is to reform the criminal justice system of Ghana to meet the needs of an emerging society and add the country to the league of nations that has moved away from capital punishment. The death penalty, also referred to as "capital punishment", is state-sanctioned execution of individuals convicted of specified offences.

In Ghana, the death penalty is imposed after a conviction for murder, attempt to commit murder, genocide, treason, high treason and or piracy and smuggling of gold or diamond. By section 3 of the Criminal and Other Offences Procedure Act, Act 30 , execution of the death penalty may either be by hanging or shooting by firing squad.

The imposition of the death penalty as punishment takes its root from the retributive theory of punishment. Moving the motion for the Bill to be read the second time, Mr Sosu said out of about 56 Commonwealth countries, only seven countries still retained the death penalty. He told the House that since independence in , Ghana had executed 49 persons either by firing squad or by hanging, with most of those executions happening during military regimes.

He recalled how Ghana had made moves to abolish the death penalty, citing how the then NDC government commissioned in the Constitutional Review Commission that recommended that the death penalty be replaced with life imprisonment. He said the then government, through a white paper, accepted that recommendation but steps to address it were not complete until it lost power.

Since then, he said, there had been a political, religious and judicial consensus for the abolition of the death penalty, with the current President openly endorsing the end of the use of mandatory death penalty both home and abroad. He argued that anytime the death penalty was carried out, those who were executed did not stand the chance to appeal their conviction even in the face of new evidence that might exonerate them.

Ghana's Parliament today (25 July ) abolished the death penalty for all ordinary crimes (including murder, genocide, piracy and smuggling of gold and.

In his view, for three decades those who committed offences for which the death penalty should apply did not suffer it because no President had ever been ready to append his signature for the person to be executed. So why should the death penalty still continue to be on our statute books? Contributing, Dr Ayine, a former Deputy Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, said he had personal reasons for not supporting the death penalty.