The courtroom erupted in cheers.
When Justice Alice Komuhangi handed down a death sentence against Christopher Okello Onyum on April 2, 2026, for the premeditated stabbing of four toddlers at a Ggaba Kindergarten, the public reaction was immediate and visceral. And honestly, it is not difficult to understand why. The victims were aged 1 to 2.5 years. They were in a place meant to nurture them. What Okello did was not merely criminal. It was a rupture in the moral fabric of our society.
But I have spent more than two decades inside Uganda’s criminal justice system, representing victims’ families at their most broken and accused persons at their most desperate. And what I have learned is this: the loudest moments in a courtroom are rarely the ones that carry the most legal weight.
The death sentence imposed on Okello is legally sound. Under Article 22(1) of Uganda’s Constitution, the death penalty remains permissible for the most serious crimes. The court rejected his insanity defense, found clear evidence of premeditation including digital searches referencing schools and violent content, and applied the post Kigula sentencing framework, which grants judges discretion rather than mandating the maximum penalty automatically. Justice Komuhangi exercised that discretion deliberately and with full awareness of the aggravating factors: multiple victims, extreme vulnerability, and an utter absence of remorse.
So yes, the sentence is defensible. But legality and justice are not always the same conversation.
Here is what the cheering crowd may not know. Uganda has not carried out a civilian execution in more than 25 years. The last confirmed batch of hangings at Luzira Prison occurred in April 1999. Since then, dozens of death sentences have been handed down. Most of those condemned are still alive today, not because of clemency, but because the president has been willing to sign the warrants. International pressure, human rights obligations, and the complicated optics of state killing have conspired to create what legal scholars call a de facto moratorium. We retain the penalty on paper. We simply do not enforce it in practice.
This creates a peculiar and troubling paradox. Our courts pronounce death with solemnity and moral authority. Our executive quietly looks the other way. Victims’ families, who deserve resolution and peace, are instead left in a state of indefinite limbo. And the condemned, whatever their crimes, sit on death row sometimes for decades, a situation the Supreme Court itself described in the landmark Susan Kigula ruling of 2009 as potentially amounting to cruel and degrading treatment when it extends beyond three years after all appeals are exhausted.
I am not writing this to defend Christopher Okello Onyum. What he did is monstrous, and I will not diminish that for a moment. I am writing this because the Ggaba case forces us to confront a question we have been avoiding for a generation: what exactly is the death penalty doing for us if we never actually use it?
Proponents will argue deterrence. But the research on this is deeply contested, and Uganda’s own data offers no clear evidence that the threat of hanging has suppressed violent crime. Others argue retribution, the ancient principle that the punishment must match the gravity of the act. There is something deeply human in that instinct, and I respect it. The families of those four babies deserve to feel that the full weight of the state stood in solidarity with their grief.
But retribution is only meaningful if it is real. A sentence that will almost certainly never be carried out is not retribution. It is theater.
There is also the question of error. The death penalty is irreversible. Uganda’s justice system, like every justice system in the world, is operated by human beings who make mistakes. We have seen wrongful convictions. We have seen confessions obtained under duress. We have seen forensic evidence misread. In a case as emotionally charged as this one, where public opinion was thunderously clear before the trial even concluded, the pressure on every actor in the process was immense. That does not mean the verdict is wrong. But it does mean we must hold the standard of scrutiny to its highest level, and we must build in every safeguard available, including the full appellate process that Okello now has 14 days to initiate.
What should Uganda actually do?
Parliament and the executive cannot keep deferring this conversation. The options are clear. We can abolish the death penalty formally, as the trajectory of international law and regional norms strongly suggests we eventually will. Or we can retain it and commit to enforcing it with full procedural rigor, transparency, and consistency. What we cannot responsibly continue to do is sentence people to death and then watch them grow old on death row while we pretend the sentence means something.
Life imprisonment without the possibility of remission is not a soft option. It is permanent incapacitation. It removes the offender from society forever. It achieves every legitimate penological goal that death achieves, without the moral hazard of state sanctioned killing and without the devastating finality of an error.
For Okello specifically, his dual Ugandan and American citizenship will almost certainly generate diplomatic scrutiny and international attention that further complicates any execution pathway. That is not an injustice. It is simply a reality our system will have to navigate.
The four children killed in Ggaba that morning deserved a long, full life. Their families deserve truth, accountability, and peace. Uganda deserves a justice system that means what it says.
Whether that ultimately demands the hangman or a locked cell for the rest of Okello’s natural life, the law must answer with consistency and with courage. The cheers in that courtroom were the voice of a wounded society demanding to be heard.
It is time our institutions listened and gave that wound something more lasting than a sentence that may never be enforced.
The author is an advocate of the High Court of Uganda with over 20 years of experience in criminal law.
