Justice Diana Kavedza delivered the ruling on October 19, 2026, and set sentencing for Friday, November 6. She said the convicted men and women must be brought to open court to hear it. One of the accused had pleaded guilty to all counts and was convicted on his own plea.
The judge found that the deaths came from the unlawful acts and omissions of those who built and kept up a regime of starvation in the forest. She rejected the defense claim that the victims, all under the age of 16, had chosen to fast themselves to death. Autopsies in the case showed that most of the dead had died of hunger.
Mackenzie's lawyer, Lawrence Obonyo, called the verdict "perplexing" and said the defense intends to appeal. Mackenzie also faces separate charges of manslaughter and terrorism, and he has pleaded not guilty to both. The case began in 2023, when investigators exhumed bodies from shallow graves across the forest, and the count of the dead climbed past four hundred.
What a shepherd owes the lambs
I will not dress this up. Children were starved in the name of God. They were told that hunger was holiness and that death was the road to heaven. A man who stood in a pulpit's place, with a Bible in his hand, led trusting families into the brush and let little ones waste away. A court has now said so, and the grieving have waited a long time to hear it.
Some will say this is what comes of religion. My friend, it is the opposite. It is what comes when a man puts himself in the place of Christ and bends the Word to his own purpose. The Lord saw this day coming and warned us plainly:
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." (Matthew 7:15)
Notice the sheep's clothing. The wolf does not arrive looking like a wolf. He comes with scripture on his tongue and a gentle word, and he sounds sure. Frightened and hungry people, who want badly to be right with God, are the ones most easily led off. Anyone who tells you to starve yourself, cut off your family, or hand over your children for the sake of heaven is not speaking for the Good Shepherd.
Jesus never asked a child to die for Him. He took the children up in His arms. When His disciples tried to turn them away, He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14). And He spoke of those who harm them with a severity found almost nowhere else in His teaching: "it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6).
Justice is God's idea
Some believers feel uneasy when a court punishes a man who claimed to speak for the Lord. They should not. Scripture says the magistrate "beareth not the sword in vain" (Romans 13:4). A nation that weighs the evidence, hears the defense, and then names the crime for what it is has done a righteous thing. The defendants have the right to appeal, and that right should be honored. But the weight of the finding falls on the side of the children who cannot speak.
The sanctity of life does not begin late or end early. It covers the child in the womb, the child in the forest, and the old man in his last days. Every life is made in the image of God, and no preacher, however loud, has the right to spend it.
So here is the plain counsel for any man or woman listening. Test every voice against the written Word. Ask whether it leads you toward life or toward death, toward your family or away from it, toward the open Christ of the Gospels or toward a secret that only one man holds. The true Shepherd said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). He does not take life. He gave His own.
Kenya has 191 graves to remember, and 190 of them are small. The way to honor them is to hold fast to the Christ who loved them, and to refuse every voice that points another way.