Purity Kathure, a teenager from Isiolo, has been serving a life sentence for a crime she maintains she did not commit. At just 16 years old, her life took a tragic turn following the murder of her father.
According to court records, Purity overheard her mother discussing a plan to hire someone to kill her father. Shocked and distressed, she sought comfort from her boyfriend. Just two days later, she learned from her brother that her father had been brutally murdered.
In the aftermath, Purity returned home to find that the police had taken her father’s body. Amid the chaos, her mother gave her permission to use her father’s old Nokia phone, unaware that it had been at the crime scene and was being monitored by investigators.
Purity inserted her SIM card into the phone, unknowingly providing authorities with a critical piece of evidence. Two weeks later, she, her mother, and her boyfriend were arrested. Despite her lawyer’s advice to deny ever using the phone, Safaricom data confirmed that she had been communicating through it, which became a key factor in her life imprisonment sentence.
In a cruel twist, her mother was released due to insufficient evidence linking her to the murder, while Purity was left to bear the full consequences.
Now, after spending 15 years in prison, Purity expresses a deep sense of hopelessness about ever achieving justice or regaining her freedom.
While in custody, she has made specific requests to prison authorities, including the provision of conjugal rights for female prisoners and connecting the prison to the national power grid to alleviate some of the hardships she and other inmates endure.
Purity’s story highlights not only the tragic consequences of circumstantial evidence and flawed legal counsel, but also the broader challenges faced by young women in the criminal justice system, particularly those wrongfully convicted.
This case has sparked debate over judicial accountability, prison conditions, and the rights of women in detention, raising urgent questions about how justice is administered in complex and sensitive cases.