Death-row prisoners drag Nigerian gov’t to court

The plaintiffs are challenging the constitutionality of keeping them on death row for long years, while asking to be executed without further delay or have their punishment converted to prison terms

Twenty-seven prisoners at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prisons, Apapa, Lagos, in neighbouring Nigeria have engaged a legal battle against the federal and Lagos state governments over what they call impropriety of their prolonged stay in prison detention on death row, reports say.
In a suit filed at the Federal High Court in Lagos recently, according to The Guardian, the condemned prisoners are questioning «a miscarriage of justice inherent in their delayed execution». They are also seeking to challenge the constitutionality of keeping them on death row for periods ranging from six through 10 to 24 years, during which they have allegedly been subjected to untold mental and psychological trauma.
Jeune Afrique newspaper has reported that the plaintiffs are demanding to be executed as soon as possible.
Those who are following the case keenly have expressed sympathy for the condemned prisoners. Some argue that the excruciating mental, physical and psychological agonies that a criminal on death row experiences every other moment, as he awaits the executioner’s noose, could be better imagined than described: Every knock on his door brings the hangman. Every moment, from when the judge read out the terminal judgement; «The sentence of death of the court upon you is that you be hanged by the neck until you be dead and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul,» he dies, as it were, but lives on.
The agony with which the condemned prisoners have lived is even more excruciating when viewed against the cruel treatment of inmates in Nigerian prison cells. Jeune Afrique observes that if the authority do not even execute them, it is probable that the majority of them will die of malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and other forms of diseases, and horrible prison conditions.
Meantime, The Guardian reports that the prisoners are also asking the court to convert their death sentences to terms of imprisonment, presuming that the governments have under the influence of time lost the power to execute them.
More so, in 2008 the European parliament adopted a resolution calling on Nigerian authorities to abolish the death penalty and confirmed that since 2002, even without an official agreement, the federal government has not carried out any execution. But then, prisoners are shedding tears.
Of the 53 African countries, 13 have already abolished the death penalty as punishment; meanwhile 22 do not apply it. And on the global scene, 137 of the 192 members of the United Nations no longer execute their citizens.