Life imprisonment in international criminal tribunals and selected African jurisdictions - Mauritius, South Africa and Uganda
Loading...
Date
2009
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Western Cape
Abstract
It is rare in law and in other disciplines for a word or a phrase to appear to mean what it does not. This is, however, true when it comes to life
imprisonment or life sentence. I Unlike sentences like the death penalty, there have been instances where even those who are expected to know the meaning of the sentence of life imprisonment have misunderstood it.2 This misunderstanding is compounded by the fact that even dictionaries that have always helped us to understand the meaning of the words are of little help when it comes to the definition of life imprisonment. The Oxford Advanced Leamer's Dictionary, for example, defines life sentence to mean 'the punishment by which [some body] spends the rest of their life in prison." It goes ahead to define a 'lifer' as 'a person who has been sent to The ambiguity of life imprisonment could partly explain why the campaign prison for their whole life." to abolish the death penalty and substitute it with life imprisonment has
option to choose between the death penalty and life-imprisonment,
Description
Doctor Educationis
Keywords
Death penalty, Appraising Punishment, South African, Ugandan, Law