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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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Maryland: Death-row inmate John Booth-El found dead in his cell

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A man who spent more than two decades on death row was found dead in his cell at North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland Sunday morning, a state corrections spokesman said.

Corrections staff at the prison found John Booth-El, 60, unresponsive not long after an officer had spoken with him earlier in the morning, according to Mark Vernarelli, the spokesman. Booth was pronounced dead shortly afterward, despite attempts to revive him, Vernarelli said.

The death appears to have been from natural causes, Vernarelli said. The State Medical Examiner will make an official determination after an autopsy.

Booth-El was housed in a single cell, like other inmates with death sentences, Vernarelli said.

Booth-El had been on death row since he was convicted in 1990 of fatally stabbing his neighbors, Irvin and Rose Bronstein, during a robbery of their Northwest Baltimore home in May 1983. His death sentence has been overturned three times, only to be reimposed.

Source: Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2014
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