In 2002, a court in Uganda sentenced me to death. I was in my early twenties. The law at the time made death the only possible sentence for murder, so the judge never needed to consider who I was, what my life had been, or what had happened in our home.
My conviction for the killing of my partner rested heavily on the testimony of a three-year-old child who had been in the custody of my accusers (my stepmother-in-law). I have always maintained my innocence, not because I want to appear innocent, but because it is the truth, and this is the real life I have lived.
For the 16 years I spent in prison, living in uncertainty and constantly facing death row syndrome, Luzira Women's Prison became my home. I had no hope of finding a way out. Every morning and evening seemed as though it might be my last. I eventually found hope in singing and leading the prison choir. I studied law from prison and supported my fellow women with legal challenges in their cases because no one was willing to help them. They were poor and could not afford paid lawyers. I learned that a woman on death row is forgotten twice: first by a justice system designed around men, then by a world that rarely asks what happened to her.
Studying law from behind the prison gates and understanding the need to fight for justice and against arbitrary laws, I came to understand that my fight should be for everyone on death row. I teamed up with FHRI, Katende Ssempebwa & Co. Advocates, and other stakeholders who believed in our cause. I led a famous case in Uganda's Constitutional Court, known as Susan Kigula & 417 Others vs. The Attorney General, on behalf of myself and 416 others on Uganda's death row, challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty and mandatory death sentences in Uganda.
Finally, in 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that death sentences still being challenged in appellate courts should be suspended and reviewed through resentencing. I was resentenced to 20 years. By this time, I had served 16 years and was considered for remission because of my good conduct in prison. In 2016, I walked out of prison. Later, I graduated with a law degree from the University of London.
Today, I am a human rights lawyer, activist, death penalty abolitionist and legal consultant. I founded the Sunny African Children's Center, which cares for the children of people in prison and other vulnerable young people. It also supports women as they reintegrate into their communities through economic empowerment and social justice.
My story is not an exception. It is part of a pattern. In 2018, the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide published Judged for More Than Her Crime, the first global study of women facing execution. It counted at least 500 women on death row and found that most had been convicted of murder, often of a family member, in a context of gender-based violence.
The report also found that women seen as breaking the rules of how a woman should behave were more likely to be condemned. We are judged against expectations of what a good woman, wife or mother should be. That discrimination can shape a woman's experience at every stage, from investigation and trial to sentencing and imprisonment.
Later, mapping by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty estimated that between 500 and 1,000 women were on death row in at least 42 countries, most for murder or drug trafficking. Countries with mandatory death sentences, like the one I faced, tend to hold more of them because the law never lets the story behind the crime be heard. Even where it can be, overworked and underfunded legal aid lawyers and male-dominated courts do not always take the time to listen to a woman or to make her feel safe enough to speak about trauma she may have carried in silence for years.
This sits inside a wider crisis. As Women Beyond Walls has documented in From Poverty to Punishment, poverty and discrimination are driving women's imprisonment up faster than men's. Yet, as its report Forgotten by Funders shows, the organisations working on this are overlooked, even by human rights and women's rights funders.
Few cases show the brutality of the death penalty more starkly than that of Christa Pike. She was 18 in 1995 when she took part in the killing of Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Job Corps programme in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the USA. Nothing I write here lessens that loss or the grief of Colleen's family. But Christa arrived at that crime after a childhood of repeated rape and abuse, abuse that Tennessee's own lawyers did not dispute in court this summer. She then spent nearly 30 years, much of it in solitary confinement, as the only woman on her state's death row.
On 30 September, Tennessee tried to execute her. According to her lawyers, she was given two full rounds of lethal injection and survived. The Death Penalty Information Center says no one else in the modern US era has survived the administration of those drugs. Her arms were left burned and blistered. Days later, she was conscious and speaking, still handcuffed to her hospital bed.
The world watched because she was about to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than 200 years. I am grateful that people were watching at all. But spectacle is not the same as visibility. As of June 2026, there were 45 women with active death sentences in the United States, and hundreds more from Indonesia to Nigeria to Iran. Most will never see their names in a headline. Their histories of abuse will never be read aloud to a judge.
That is why I am proud to be part of the Sunny Series: seven short films made by Women Beyond Walls with the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The series is named in memory of my friend Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs, who spent 17 years in prison for a crime she did not commit, five of them on death row in Florida. After her release in 1992, she gave her life to fighting the death penalty and making women's voices heard. She died in 2025, and I still carry her courage with me.
The first film tells my story. Others follow Rosita, a woman on death row in Indonesia, and Devi, who grew up with her mother, Merri, under sentence of death. The films show how drug laws become death sentences for women, examine a system built by men for men in Nigeria and the United States, and trace how Sierra Leone abolished the death penalty.
Women who have lived through prison are not simply subjects of research or faces for campaigns. We are experts on the systems that shaped our lives, and our knowledge should guide advocacy, policy and how we understand justice.
It is easy to execute a monster. It is much harder to execute a woman who was raped as a child, a mother who carried drugs to feed her children, or a wife who killed to survive. When people see the whole woman, the case for killing her falls apart. I know this because Uganda’s courts changed the law once we made them see us.