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Indonesia | 14 years on death row: Timeline of Mary Jane Veloso’s ordeal and fight for justice

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MANILA, Philippines — The case of Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina on death row in Indonesia for drug trafficking, has spanned over a decade and remains one of the most high-profile legal battles involving an overseas Filipino worker. Veloso was arrested on April 25, 2010, at Adisucipto International Airport in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, after she was found in possession of more than 2.6 kilograms of heroin. She was sentenced to death in October – just six months after her arrest. Indonesia’s Supreme Court upheld the penalty in May 2011.

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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