The Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS) has disclosed that no fewer than 3,298 inmates in prisons across the country are on death row.
Its spokesman, Abubakar Umar, who stated this on Wednesday in Abuja, said many of them committed capital offences like culpable homicide, armed robbery, and terrorism, among others.
He explained that the term’ condemned criminal’ was abrogated with the emergence of the NCoS Act 2019, which made the prisons correctional centres.
Umar said the service preferred using “inmates on death row (IDR),” stressing that death sentences are not always carried out immediately after they were imposed.
“There are often long periods of uncertainty for the convicted while their cases are being appealed at higher levels. Inmates awaiting execution live on what we call death row; some offenders have been executed more than 15 years after their convictions,” the official added.
He added that the last execution of IDRs was in 2016 in Edo, encouraging “state governors, who shy away from signing the death warrants, to commute them into other sanctions.”
