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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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Uganda abolishes mandatory death penalty for certain crimes

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There are 133 inmates on death row and no-one has been executed in the last 20 years.

Parliament in Uganda has passed a law that abolishes the mandatory death penalty for certain crimes, amending four different laws that had earlier prescribed capital punishment, including the Anti-Terrorism Act.

If approved by President Yoweri Museveni, the amendments will restrict the death penalty to just the most serious of crimes, only at the judge's discretion.

Legislators say it is a step towards the complete abolition of capital punishment, something for which courts have previously voiced support.

There are 133 inmates on death row and no-one has been executed in the last 20 years.

There has been a campaign to end capital punishment, following a 2009 court ruling in favour of then death row inmate Susan Kigula, who had argued that the death sentence was unconstitutional.

The court then ruled that the death penalty should not be mandatory in cases of murder, and that a condemned person should not be kept on death row indefinitely - if a convict was not executed within three years, the sentence be automatically turned into life imprisonment.

Source: BBC News, Staff, August 21, 2019


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Uganda
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