INDIA: ON DEATH ROW SINCE 1991, HE WAITS FOR HANGMAN

Piara Singh, 80, cannot walk or see and his dementia gets worse by the day. Piara, a murder convict sentenced to death in 1996, has been languishing in Amritsar jail since 1991, mostly in solitary confinement, with neither death nor mercy rescuing him from his increasingly wretched existence. His mercy petition has been pending with the President since 1997. Piara whispers that he can't take it anymore. ''I should have been hanged the day they said I should be killed,'' he mumbles.