By BOB WASWANI
May 10, 2026| For nine years, Philip Wabomba Mukubali has sat in a prison cell, convicted of murdering a man he says he never intended to kill. On 24th April 2026, the Court of Appeal in Kisumu did something remarkable: it set him free, not because his hands were clean, but because the prosecution finally admitted it had gotten the case wrong from the start.
The story begins on a February evening in 2017. Mukubali, a retired teacher, had just collected Kshs. 700 in rent from his tenants in Namarambi village, Bungoma. As he walked home, he says two men attacked him—among them Augustine Wanyama Murumbi, the man who would end up dead, and Cypranus Soita Natembeya, the prosecution’s star witness.
What happened next is bitterly disputed. The prosecution claimed Mukubali stabbed the deceased on the left collarbone, a wound that pierced his heart. Mukubali insists he was the one being robbed, and that in the chaos, it was Natembeya—his own cousin—who inflicted the fatal blow.
The trial court did not believe him. In March 2020, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
A conviction built on sand
The problem, as the Court of Appeal would later find, was that the entire prosecution case rested almost entirely on the word of one man: Natembeya. No murder weapon was produced. No forensic evidence linked Mukubali to the stabbing. And the trial judge, the appellate court noted, never explained why he preferred the witness’s version over the accused’s defence.
“We cannot fault the appellant in lamenting that his defence was given short shrift yet it created reasonable doubt,” wrote Justices Milton Asike-Makhandia, Hannah A. Omondi, and Luka K. Kimaru in their unanimous ruling.
Then came the shocker. In the appeal, the prosecution conceded—openly admitting that the conviction was “unsafe” because it relied on uncorroborated evidence from a single witness.
Not murder, but not innocent
The appellate judges did not buy Mukubali’s claim that someone else stabbed the deceased. They noted he never put that allegation to witnesses during cross-examination, only raising it in his defence as an afterthought. “Only three people were involved,” they observed: the appellant, the deceased, and the witness.
But on the critical question of malice aforethought—the cold intent required for murder—the court found the prosecution had fallen short. There was no premeditation. No motive was proven. This was a confrontation that spiraled out of control.
“In the absence of malice aforethought, it cannot be said that the offence of murder was established,” the judges ruled.
Freedom, at last
The court reduced the conviction from murder to manslaughter. But instead of imposing a new sentence, the judges looked at the calendar. Mukubali had already served more than nine years in custody, including three years awaiting trial. They decided that was punishment enough.
“The appellant has been sufficiently punished,” the court held. “The sentence of 25 years imprisonment is set aside and substituted with the sentence already served. The appellant shall be set at liberty forthwith.”
For a retired teacher who walked home with rent money and ended up in handcuffs, the gavel has finally fallen in his favour. But nine years lost—for a crime the prosecution itself now says was never proven beyond reasonable doubt—is a wound that may never fully heal.