Nigeria stoning verdict quashed

By Dan Isaacs
BBC, Lagos

An Islamic court of appeal in northern Nigeria has overturned the conviction of a man sentenced to death by stoning for the rape of a nine-year-old girl.

Sarimu Mohammed Baranda arrived at court on a police motorbike

Sarimu Mohammed Baranda won his appeal by pleading insanity and has been ordered by the court to an asylum for psychiatric evaluation.

The punishment of stoning to death has been introduced into the law in Nigeria's majority Muslim northern states over the past three years but as yet no sentence has been carried out.

Sarimu Mohammed has never denied he carried out the rape.

In fact he pleaded guilty at his trial last year and initially refused to appeal the sentence.

But family members intervened and persuaded him to change his mind.

Powerless

Sarimu's case was a particularly important one for those opposed to such strict Islamic punishments on moral grounds.

In all other cases of stoning punishments being handed down by the Sharia courts it has been for those, almost all of them women, who had committed the consensual act of adultery.

Defending a rapist - and worse, one that had admitted his crime - was not something most human rights groups have gone out of their way to do.

So the only option for Sarimu Mohammed's lawyers was to plead insanity - which they have now successfully done.

But what this case does indicate is the apparent reluctance of the Islamic authorities in the north to see these punishments actually carried out.

The federal government says it is determined to make sure no-one is actually put to death by stoning but President Olusegun Obasanjo says he is powerless under the constitution to directly intervene in such cases and that the Islamic criminal code now in place in the northern states is independent of federal law.

Many legal experts within Nigeria disagree with this interpretation.

However, the debate can only be settled once and for all if one of the pending appeals makes its way to the ultimate arbitration under the constitution - the Supreme Court in the capital, Abuja.