One of the 28 men was Haji Musa Sebirumbi, a former National Security Agent and official formerly affiliated with the Uganda People's Congress, who had been on death row since his 1989 conviction of five murders he committed in 1981, and the loss of his appeal in June 1992, while Amnesty was not able to identify details about the other impending executions.
"[14] Critics of Museveni's government accused Museveni of using the proposed return of the death penalty to threaten his political opponents rather than to address rising crime rates, as well as using discussion about reviving capital punishment to distract from a new constitutional amendment that would permit him to rule "for life" by eliminating the preexisting age limit prohibiting a Ugandan president from serving past the age of 75.
[8] In 2012, there were an estimated 6,000 inmates on remand awaiting trial on capital charges that potentially carried the death penalty.
[4][15] The case of Susan Kigula was instrumental in leading to Uganda's abolition of the mandatory death penalty for murder.
[16] The challenge Kigula and her attorneys presented on behalf of all Ugandan death row inmates proved successful; in 2005, Uganda's Constitutional Court abolished the mandatory death penalty for murder, finding it to be a "violation of fundamental human rights" and putting an inmate's right to a fair trial in jeopardy due to eliminating the opportunity for mitigation in sentencing, and requiring the Ugandan government to re-sentence every inmate on death row.
[16][18] Uganda's High Court reevaluated Kigula's own death sentence in 1976; for the first time since the abolition of the mandatory death penalty, the High Court was permitted to consider holistic views of capital defendants' characters and took Kigula's good behaviour behind bars and lack of prior record into consideration.
[15] In 2023, the Parliament of Uganda passed the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, 2023, which among other restrictions against LGBT people, prescribes the death penalty for 'aggravated homosexuality.
In August 2023, two Ugandan men located in the city of Soroti – 20-year-old Michael Opolot and an unnamed 41-year-old man – were at risk of becoming the first to receive the death penalty under Uganda's new anti-homosexuality statutes.
Opolot's trial date was projected to be over three years from the time of his arrest due to the higher stakes involved in capital prosecutions in Uganda.