A Lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Ghana, Dr Opoku Adusei has opposed the hanging or shooting to death of the murders of the late Capt. Maxwell Adam Mahama, as penalty for lynching soldier.

Ghana was thrown into a state of utter shock when news went round of the guesome killing of the Junior Military Officer by a mob in Denkyira Obuase, in the Upper Denkyira West District on Monday.

Captain Maxwell Mahama, an Officer with the 5th Batallion of Infantry at Burma Camp, Accra was on duty as a Commander of a Military Detachment at Diaso, but was lynched in Obuase by the inhabitants on suspicion he was an armed robber while he was on a 20 kilometer walk.

Two women who reportedly saw a pistol on him after he had bought snails from one of them, alarmed by what they had seen called the assemblyman for the area on phone who also organized the youth of the town to lynch him.

Outraged by the destardly act, a section of the public have called for the death penalty to be meted out against the perpetrators for this heinous crime.

At a durbar organized by the Military High Command at Burma Camp last week, some angry soldiers quoted the Biblical saying “he who draws the sword will die by the sword”, calling for the perpetrators to be killed in similar manner as their colleague.

But contributing to a discussion on the matter on Joy FM’s News File Show Saturday, Dr Opoku Adusei said the culprits being sentenced to death without being killed must be enough.

“There’s a place in Nsawam Prison, the condition you live in there, if you survive ten years and your eyesight will still be there then you are lucky. For this type of crime I don’t think any government will come in the future and grant you a pardon and maybe remit your death sentence into life imprisonment for you to come to the open area of the prison, because this death has caused national outrage. The fact that we still have death penalty on our statutes book, that should suffice for now instead of they being hanged or shot to death.”

As of December 31 2015, there were 137 people, including three women, on the death row in Ghana, seven of whom are foreign nationals.

Since the death penalty clause was included in Ghana’s 1992 constitution, the courts continue to sentence people to death, although no executions have been carried out since 1993.

Since then no president has signed any death warrant, instead, they have commuted the punishments to life sentences of life imprisonment.