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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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Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio signs bill formally abolishing the death penalty

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Sierra Leone had long allowed the use of death penalties, but has not carried out an execution since 1998

Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio on Friday signed a bill abolishing the death penalty, becoming the latest African state to ban capital punishment.

The move comes after lawmakers in the West African country voted to end capital punishment in July, replacing the punishment with life imprisonment or a minimum 30-year jail term.

"As a nation, we have today exorcised horrors of a cruel past," Bio said in a statement, adding that capital punishment is "inhumane".

"We today affirm our belief in the sanctity of life," he added.

Sierra Leone, which is still recovering after decades of civil war, had frequently come under fire from rights groups for keeping capital punishment on the books.

The government announced that it would move to ban the death penalty in order to uphold human rights in May, before Sierra Leone's parliament approved an abolition bill.

The last executions in Sierra Leone were carried out in 1998, when 24 military officers were put to death after a coup attempt the year before.

Since then death sentences were often commuted.

A diamond-rich former British colony, the nation of 7.5 million people remains one of the poorest in the world.

Sierra Leone's economy was ravaged by a 1991-2002 civil war that claimed 120,000 lives, followed by an Ebola epidemic from 2014 to 2016.

Source: Agence France-Presse, Staff, October 8, 2021


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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: Sierra Leone
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