Editorial -Revisit Life Imprisonment Laws For Murders

On Monday, December 13, Liberians were again awakened to the news of another murder-this time, in the Tusa Field Community in the Township of Gardnersville, just outside Monrovia. It was the remains of a five year old child, Patience Nyantee, lying in a pool of blood at the residence of her guardians, after being mercilessly murdered by the spouse of her aunt. Jerry Weah is reported to have stabbed little Patience on the neck after stifling her with a cloth in her mouth.

The brutal murder of this five year-old girl was a transfer aggression, resulting from a stand-off between Jerry, the man she considered her father and Esther Nyantee, her aunt over the amount of Two-Thousand Liberian dollars he gave her for petite business.

Eye witnesses at the crime scene, disclosed that the accused, believed to be in his thirties, attempted murdering his fiancée while assaulting her because she could not meet up with his request for the money, but she maneuvered to escape at which time Jerry, under pretense as a father, asked the victim to go to bed along with him, after other tenants had left for bed.

The brutal murder of little Patience Nyantee is the latest of such heinous crime, which has become very rampant in recent times in our country. Less than two weeks ago, one John Kollie (presently in police custody) brutally killed his young wife in the Soul Clinic community, Paynesville on suspicion of having extra-marital affairs.

Many more of these murders are occurring day-by-day throughout our country. We are of the fervent belief that heartless individuals are committing these murders because of the flexibility being exercised by the law due to the influence of some members of the international community.

Because the Republic of Liberia is a signatory to an international convention, which prohibits punishment by death, perpetrators of such barbaric acts continue to take advantage of the “life-time imprisonment” to kill innocent human beings.

Because the “law” will not kill them, but only sentence them to life imprisonment and free them as we observe in Liberia today, they’ve chosen to thrive on the path of carnage-killing other people. No matter how whoever feels, we at the New Dawn-Liberia see such judgment for murderers as a new form of impunity and an encouragement for others to use such means in seeking redress to their problems.

This is why; we are challenging the Government of Liberia to reconsider its signature to such a convention or be held responsible for the continuous killing in cold blood of Liberians by people without any sense of civilization and reasoning. The Government of Liberia must restore hope to its people by revisiting and removing murder-friendly laws, and replacing them with those that would either stop or reduce murder.

We also call on our colleague in the media to take this concern as a serious challenge to campaign against laws which encourage the killing of innocent human being in our country by heartless individuals. We must return to the days of Liberia’s most progressive President, the late Dr. William R. Tolbert, Jr., wherein “one who killed, was also killed by the law,” as occasioned by the cases of Justin Obi, William Tolbert, James Anderson and others in the 1970s.