Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons legal case officer...

Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons legal case officer Umesh Raga said there were seven prisoners in the Umtata Maximum Security prison, South Africa, who were technically still facing the death penalty although the death penalty had been written out of the law six years previously.
They were all sentenced in the Umtata High Court - two in 1988, one in 1987, three in 1986 and one in 1992," said Raga. He said records indicated that at least some of the seven had appeared in court again in 2000, presumably as the process to convert their sentences started.
This process did not appear to have been completed. Raga said the responsibility for processing the cases lay with the Department of Justice and the Legal Aid Board.
Countrywide, there were still believed to be dozens of prisoners who were sentenced to death before the abolition of the death penalty in 1995, who were still waiting for their sentences to be commuted.
The Judicial Inspectorate of Prisons' Gideon Morris said the statistics were not reliable because in some cases the sentences had been converted but the prisoners had not been informed. He said all those still under the death sentence would be held in maximum security prisons.
"There are 108 in 243 prisons countrywide. These people are scattered throughout these prisons," said Department of Correctional Services spokesman Maupi Monyemangene. Monyemangene said he did not have details of which prisoners were being held where. "It's statistics that we really don't have to keep because the sentences will be converted eventually. It's just an administrative glitch."
He said it was the Department of Justice's job to convert the death sentences to life imprisonment.
"We are simply custodians," said Monyemangene.
"We are dealing with the cases one by one," said Department of Justice spokesman Kaizer Kganyago.
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) said the process of commuting the death sentences to alternatives such as life imprisonment needed to be speeded up.
"There's absolutely no reason why a person under the death sentence cannot have their sentence revisited," said LHR spokesman Louis van der Merwe.
"To keep a person for an indefinite period of detention just because he was sentenced to death is cruel and inhuman punishment."
Van der Merwe did not have details of which prisons the prisoners were being held in.
He said some whose cases had gone through the entire appeal process including failed appeals for clemency from the state president, had been sentenced to death 15 or 16 years ago.