Rally driver Maxine Wahome has walked free from the High Court after a judge ruled that the prosecution had failed, comprehensively, to prove she killed her boyfriend Assad Khan.
The case had trailed Wahome for months, casting a shadow over a promising motorsport career and thrusting her into the kind of public scrutiny few young sportswomen in Kenya ever face.
On Tuesday, that chapter closed — not with a compromise or a technicality, but with an outright finding that the Directorate of Public Prosecutions never had the evidence to begin with.
The court said the material presented fell short of the threshold the law demands before a murder conviction can stand.
Wahome, who had maintained her innocence from the moment she was charged over Khan’s death following what was described as a domestic incident, now leaves the courtroom with no criminal case hanging over her.
For her lawyer, Steve Kimathi, the ruling was less a legal formality than a correction of an injustice he believes should never have reached a courtroom at all.
“I am extremely pleased with the Court’s decision to acquit Maxine. This is a case that should never have been brought before the courts in the first place, yet the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions chose to pursue it. Today’s judgment is a vindication of my client’s innocence and, most importantly, it has cleared her name. I welcome the Court’s decision and am grateful that justice has prevailed,” he said.
That comment puts the DPP’s charging decisions under the spotlight, at a time when prosecutorial judgment — what cases get filed, on what evidence, and under what pressure — is increasingly being tested in Kenyan courts.
An acquittal of this nature, delivered on the basis that the case ought not to have been mounted, is not merely a personal reprieve; it is a rebuke of process.
Kimathi has signalled that Wahome’s legal team is now considering a fresh court action, this time targeting how she was arrested and paraded before the public when the charges were first brought — a move that, if pursued, could shift scrutiny from her conduct to that of the state.
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