(He received a life imprisonment sentence). Justice Albie Sachs had been imprisoned as a member of the ANC during the National Party regime, went into exile and continued to work for the ANC in Mozambique, where South African agents blew up his automobile, costing him an arm and most of the vision in one eye.
Another involves a man on death row for 25 years after a blatantly biased judge unilaterally changed the life imprisonment sentence to death.
At his sentencing, Saginaw County (Mich). Judge Gary McDonald made it clear that this was "not the mandatory natural life imprisonment sentence" and said that if Rodriguez was a "model prisoner," McDonald would recommend release in 10 years.
He is currently waiting for the Gilan appeals court to issue its verdict and sentence, and plans to appeal again any death or imprisonment sentence to the Supreme Court.
A military appellate court on Thursday upheld the life imprisonment sentence of Wang Hsi-ling, Taiwan's former chief of intelligence, for his role in the California murder of American-Chinese journalist Henry Liu.
Déogratias (Déo) Mushayidi, chairman of the political party the Pact People's Defence (PDP) was kidnapped in Burundi and serves a life-imprisonment sentence in Rwanda where he has been deported from Burundi.
In 2007, the latest year for which statistics are available, 186 convicts were sentenced to death, but the authorities also commuted to life imprisonment the sentences of 881 people on death row, according to India's National Crime Records Bureau.
Those handed terms of administrative imprisonment serve sentences in temporary detention isolators not intended for long-term occupancy, where conditions often fall short of international standards.
The authors theorized that the "American focus on capital punishment has desensitized public concern about the huge growth of imprisonment," where sentences of multiple decades have become the norm.
