A woman with severe intellectual disabilities in Tanzania has had her conviction and death sentence quashed after spending more than a decade in prison awaiting execution.
Lemi Limbu, now in her early 30s, was convicted of the murder of her daughter in 2015. On 4 March, a court in Shinyanga, northern Tanzania, declared she can appeal. She will face a retrial, but a date has yet to be set.
Lawyers and activists say she should not have been imprisoned at all. Limbu, a survivor of repeated sexual and domestic violence, has the developmental age of a child. Under Tanzanian and international law, she should not be held criminally liable given her intellectual disability.
“She was not supposed to be in prison in the first place,” said Anna Henga, executive director of the Legal and Human Rights Centre. “I’m happy that [her conviction] has been quashed and the appeal has been allowed, but I’m sad because the court ordered a retrial, which is like starting again [after] the case has already taken more than 10 years. My worry is that it could take up to another 10 years if there are more delays.”
At her first trial Limbu pleaded not guilty. Unable to read or write, she said she did not know the contents of a statement police said she had made admitting to the murder. Her original conviction in 2015 was nullified in 2019 due to procedural errors. In 2022 she was retried and sentenced to death a second time; the court then did not allow medical evidence about her intellectual disabilities or history of abuse. A clinical psychologist who evaluated her concluded she had a severe intellectual disability and the developmental age of a 10-year-old or younger.
A second appeal was filed in 2022 and heard in February.
Limbu’s childhood and adulthood were marked by violence and sexual abuse. Growing up, she lived in a household where her father beat her mother and was repeatedly raped by men in her village; she gave birth for the first time at 15. Around 18 she married an older man, had two more children, and suffered domestic violence until she fled with her youngest child, Tabu, then about a year old.
She later met Kijiji Nyamabu, who told Limbu he would marry her but would never accept Tabu because he was not the child’s biological father. Shortly afterwards Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses; Nyamabu had already fled by the time Limbu led authorities to her daughter’s body. Limbu was arrested in August 2011. Nyamabu was never detained.
A coalition of 24 African and international human rights groups condemned Limbu’s sentence as part of an appeal to the African court on human and peoples’ rights. In July four UN human rights experts wrote to the Tanzanian government expressing concern about her case.
Tanzania retains the death penalty as a mandatory sentence for murder, though no executions have been carried out since 1995. There are more than 500 people on death row in the country, according to Henga.
Rose Malle, who was wrongfully imprisoned on death row in Tanzania and now campaigns against capital punishment, said innocent people face the death penalty due to weaknesses across the justice system, from arrest through trials. Prof Sandra Babcock, clinical professor of law and faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and a legal consultant in Limbu’s case, said: “Limbu has endured unimaginable suffering as a survivor of sexual violence living with intellectual disability. After spending more than a decade on death row, she should be released so that she can receive the care and support she needs.”
