14-Yr-Old Girl Who Killed Husband With Poison May Get Death Penalty

                 A 14-year-old girl, Wasila Tasi’u, who is accused of murdering her 35-year-old husband by putting rat poison in his food, may get a death penalty as Nigerian prosecutors said that if proved the charge is “punishable with death”.

                 According to Vanguard, the trial of Wasila, from a poor northern Nigeria family, has sparked a heated debate on the role of underage marriage in the conservative Muslim region, especially whether an adolescent girl can consent to be a bride.
Wasila Tasi’u allegedly killed her husband Umar Sani two weeks after their April wedding in the village of Unguwar Yansoro.
Tasi’u entered the High Court in Gezawa, Kano State, wearing a cream-coloured hijab and was escorted by two policemen.
Reportedly, lead prosecutor Lamido Abba Soron-Dinki said that if proved, the charge is “punishable with death” and indicated the state would seek the maximum penalty.
After the English-language charge sheet was translated into Hausa for the accused by the court clerk, Tasi’u refused to answer when asked if she understood the charges.
When the alleged offences were read again, Tasi’u stayed silent, turned her head to the wall and broke down in tears.
However, Judge Mohammed Yahaya said that the “court records (that) she pleads not guilty”, apparently regarding her silence as equal to a denial of the charges and adjourned the case until November 26.
As Vanguard reports, activists, including in Nigeria’s mainly Christian south, have called for Tasi’u’s immediate release, saying she should be rehabilitated as a victim and noting the prospect that she was raped by the man she married. However, in the north, Islamic law operates alongside the secular criminal code, a hybrid system that has complicated the question of marital consent.
According to the affected families, Tasi’u wasn’t forced into marriage, saying that girls across the impoverished region marry at 14 and that Tasi’u and Sani followed the traditional system of courtship.
According to Nigeria’s marriage act, anyone under 21 can marry provided they have parental consent and so evidence of an agreement between Tasi’u and her father Tasiu Mohammed could undermine claims of a forced union.
But defence lawyer Hussaina Aliyu has insisted the case is not a debate about the role of youth marriage in a Muslim society.
Instead, she has argued that under criminal law a 14-year-old cannot be charged with murder in a high court and has demanded that the case be moved to the juvenile system.