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As clock ticks toward another Trump presidency, federal death row prisoners appeal for clemency

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President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.
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Ohio death-row inmate Billy Sowell dies of natural causes

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The state says a condemned Ohio inmate has died of natural causes after more than a year at a prison medical facility.

Billy Sowell was sentenced to death for shooting 36-year-old Calvert Graham in Graham’s apartment in Cincinnati in 1983.

Ohio prisons spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said Sowell died of multiple organ failure yesterday at 5:45 a.m. at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus, where he’d been treated for health problems since February 2011.

Although the 75-year-old Sowell was still considered a death row inmate, 2 federal courts had ruled in favor of overturning his sentence.

The state says it stopped appeals because of Sowell’s illness.

Inmates dying of natural causes on death row are rare but not unheard of, with 6 such deaths in Ohio in the past 6 years.

Source: Columbus Dispatch, March 28, 2012
Location: Ohio, USA
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