Learn the law, hope for freedom

A SENIOR POLICEMAN in Kenya was recently sentenced to death for torturing and killing a prisoner who had been brought into a police station near Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, after drunkenly brawling with his wife. The policeman had thrashed him with a metal pipe, dunked his head in a drum of water and then, after the man had died, claimed he had been beaten by another prisoner, who was initially charged with the murder. Bribes were offered to prisoners to incriminate their fellow inmate. But the judge rejected the story and sentenced the cop to death.

The police usually enjoy impunity, especially when they kill suspected criminals, which they often do after nabbing them. More striking in this case was that, a mere four days after he was sentenced, the errant policeman was sitting in the front row of a class of 15 prisoners in Kamiti maximum-security jail outside Nairobi. Clad in the blue and white pyjamas worn by convicts, he had started a course in law under the auspices of London University.

Through the African Prisons Project (APP), a British-backed NGO, about 65 Kenyan prisoners, almost all of them lifers or on death row, are taking classes in law, their papers sent back and forth between London and Nairobi. The scheme was started by a British lawyer, Alexander McLean, in neighbouring Uganda 12 years ago...