KISUMU, 20th April 2026 –Thousands of inmates in Kenya’s heavily congested prisons could be released under proposed changes to the Penal Code.
According to the Penal Code Amendment Bill 2026, Section 4 of the Penal Code should be amended to have life imprisonment substituted with thirty years in jail.
This would mean that those who have long been in prison for over three decades will be freed.
A spot check in Naivasha and Kamiti Maximum prisons where the majority of inmates are on both death and life sentences revealed that at least 1200 and 1500 inmates respectively are on the prescribed categories of death row and life sentences as of April 2026.
Some of them were convicted in the 90’s and have exhausted all appeal avenues and if the Bill gets passed into law they’ll have had redemption.
Some of the offences that attract mandatory life or death sentences include murder, manslaughter, robbery with violence, treason, terrorism related charges and those stemming from the Sexual Offences Act 2006.
An act of robbery in which a person steals anything and at or immediately before or immediately after stealing it uses or threatens to use actual violence to any person or property to obtain the stolen item(s) or to prevent or to overcome resistance to its being stolen or retained commits and offence of robbery and is liable on conviction, to imprisonment for a term not less than 14 years.
Attempted robbery would see one spend seven years in prison whilst an aggregated robbery in which there’s use of weaponry will attract a sentence of not less than 30 years.
Those set to benefit from the Bill if passed into law also include children in conflict with the law as well as those convicted but with mental issues.
Any treasonous acts will equally be met with a thirty-year sentence as opposed to the current mandatory death sentence which is usually commuted to life imprisonment since the last known execution in Kenyan history of Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka in 1986 following the 1982 coup that rocked late President Daniel Moi’s government.
Section 333(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code demands that time spent in remand custody be factored into one’s sentence and if this Bill passes into law it would iron out technical issues stemming from that provision (Section 333(2) ) but have been overlooked by appellate courts thereby leading to congestion in prisons.
