Pressure is mounting on the Tanzanian government to release a woman with severe intellectual disabilities who has been in prison awaiting execution for 13 years.
Lemi Limbu, who is now in her early 30s, was convicted of the murder of her daughter in 2015. A survivor of brutal and repeated sexual and domestic violence, she has the developmental age of a child.
Limbu’s legal team is now worried about her deteriorating health. On a visit to the prison in June, one of her lawyers found that Limbu required assistance to walk, her stomach was swollen and her mental health had worsened. “She looked sick, weak and sad,” the lawyer said.
In Tanzania, the death penalty is the mandatory sentence for murder. Limbu’s original conviction in 2015 was nullified in 2019 due to procedural errors. But she remained incarcerated awaiting a new trial.
In 2022, she was retried and sentenced to death a second time. The court did not consider her intellectual disabilities or history of abuse. An appeal was filed in 2022 but no date for a hearing has been set.
“The constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania requires courts to not delay dispensation of justice unreasonably,” said the lawyer. “According to our laws, justice should not only be done, but be seen to be done.”
“This is a woman who absolutely should not be in prison,” said Prof Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor of law and the faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, who is acting as a legal consultant in Limbu’s case.
“This is a woman who is not violent, who represents no threat. You could release her tomorrow, and, as long as she had some kind of support for her disability, she would be able to live a reasonably productive life in society. She is somebody who needs protection.”
A coalition of 24 African and international human rights groups earlier this year condemned Limbu’s sentence as part of an appeal to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights to look at the plight of women on death row throughout Africa.
Limbu grew up in an environment of violence. Her father beat her mother and she was repeatedly raped by men in her village, who would drag her from her home. She gave birth at 15 after becoming pregnant by rape.
At about 18, she married an older man and had two more children. She later fled from her husband, who beat her, and moved to a different village with her youngest child, Tabu, who was about a year old.
There she met Kijiji Nyamabu, an alcoholic, who told Limbu he would marry her – but he said he would never accept her baby daughter, Tabu, because she had been fathered by a different man.
Shortly afterwards, Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses and Kijiji had already fled by the time Limbu brought the authorities to her daughter’s body. She was arrested in August 2011 but Kijiji was never detained.
At her first trial in 2015, Limbu pleaded not guilty. Unable to read or write, she said she did not know the contents of a statement that police claimed she had made admitting to the murder. She said she was beaten, threatened at gunpoint and detained for two days at the police station.
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At her 2022 retrial, the high court did not allow evidence from medical professionals. A clinical psychologist who evaluated her had concluded she had a severe intellectual disability and the developmental age of a 10-year-old child or younger.
Under international law, Limbu should not be held criminally liable, given her intellectual disability.
Prison conditions in Tanzania are “dire”, according to Fulgence T Massawe, director of access to justice at the Legal and Human Rights Centre, a Tanzanian advocacy organisation.
He said that in terms of supplies and sanitation, conditions in prisons were bad and the prevailing belief was that it was not a hotel “and people are here to serve their term”. ”
In a letter requesting a UN special rapporteurs appeal to the Tanzanian government, Babcock wrote: “Without urgent intervention, the poor standard of care Limbu is receiving creates an unacceptable risk that her condition will deteriorate further and become critical.”
She said Limbu’s case was “a clear example of the profoundly unjust consequences of Tanzania’s mandatory death penalty”, adding: “Limbu has been a victim of abuse since childhood and is uniquely vulnerable because of her intellectual disability.”
