adminSenior Court Reporter
A CONVICTED Binga murderer, whose death sentence was quashed by the Supreme Court in 2012, was last Friday sentenced to an effective 18 years in jail.Elson Munsaka, 33, of Manjolo in Binga, struck his employer with an axe on the neck just hours after being offered a job as a herd boy on April 27, 1999.
He was just a teenager aged 17 then.
Munsaka was in 2008 convicted of murder with actual intent and sentenced to death by Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Nicholas Ndou who has since retired from the bench.
In 2012, Munsaka through his lawyer Tanaka Muganyi of Marondedze, Mukuku and Ndove Partners, successfully appealed against the death sentence.
Setting aside the sentence, the Supreme Court under Case Number SC 77/12, ruled that Munsaka was too young for the hangman’s noose.
Munsaka was incarcerated at Harare Central Prison awaiting death when Justices Luke Malaba, Anne-Marie Gorowa and Misheck Cheda said the High Court judge had erred in imposing capital punishment as Munsaka’s age at the time of committing the crime was an extenuating circumstance.
Simbarashe Makoni of the Attorney General’s Office conceded before the Supreme Court judges that “the sentence of death can’t be supported”.
The matter was subsequently remitted to the trial court so that Justice Ndou could deal with the issue of age and consider an appropriate sentence.
Prosecuting, Makoni said Munsaka struck his employer with an axe on the neck just hours after being offered a job as a herd boy on April 27, 1999.
He then went into hiding before he was arrested in 2006 and subsequently put on trial two years later.
Justice Ndou sentenced him to death.Muganyi had told the Supreme Court that “uncontroverted evidence” showed that he was under the age of 18 at the time he committed the crime.
“Munsaka’s youthfulness ought to be an extenuating circumstance and the sentence of death imposed by the court a quo ought to be set aside and substituted with a sentence of imprisonment,” he argued.
Munsaka’s trial heard that he met Fidres Sibanda, 39, of Gcekeni Village in Tsholotsho at a bus stop in the Luhoja area.
Munsaka told Fidres that he was from Binga and had come to Tsholotsho in search of employment.
Sibanda hired him on the spot and took him to his home where he introduced him to his family.
On the same night, the two men shared a hut but they were not seen the next morning. The door to the hut was locked from the outside with a padlock when Fidres’s family went to investigate.
Three days later, on April 30, Fidres’s brother, Ben Sibanda, decided to force open a window and on looking inside saw his brother’s body lying on the bed with an axe stuck in his neck.
Police were called and they tracked down and arrested Munsaka.
In his defence, Munsaka had told the court that he acted in self-defence because Fidres wanted to strike him with an axe for refusing to share a bed with him.
He claimed that Fidres wanted to sodomise him and when he refused that is when he tried to strike him with an axe.
“I wrestled with Fidres as he tried to strike me with an axe for refusing to share a bed with him. I however managed to repossess the weapon during which I attacked him and fled before I boarded a train to Hwange,” Munsaka said.
Online Reporter