Human rights groups condemn the treatment of death row prisoners.
Lagos, Nigeria - For 17 years, Thankgod Ebohs, an inmate of Oko Prison, lived under the threat of facing the gallows. Each day, he feared that the authorities would come for him.
Even though the state outlawed capital punishment in 2006, on June 25, 2013, Ebohs blood ran icy cold as he and four other inmates were haulted before a hangman at the Oko prison gallows.
The father of three watched with horror as the hangman took turns on the condemned prisoners. But when it came to the turn of the furniture maker, the prison officials discovered that his death sentence was supposed to be carried out by gunshot instead - so his wait on death row was extended thanks to this bureaucratic error.
But even though Thankgod Ebohs escaped the gallows by the skin of his teeth, the trauma of seeing four colleagues hung profoundly affected him.
One of his sons, who asked for anonymity for fear of being prevented from seeing his father again, told Al Jazeera, "My father is still in a state of shock, when I saw him last September he was still weeping."
For now Ebohs is still alive, but his family does not know how long it will be before he faces the firing squad.
Ebohs case has helped catapult the plight of death row inmates across Nigerian prisons into the limelight. Many of these inmates have been on the death row for years, enduring the psychological trauma of the daily wait for execution.
A 2008 report by Amnesty International on death row inmates in Nigeria notes that the country has about 1000 condemned prisoners. Of those, 130 have been on death row for more than 10 years, while some have been there for more than 30 years.
Source: Aljazeera, December 4, 2013
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