FOUR MEN WERE HANGED IN FRONT OF HIM. HE WAS NEXT IN LINE THEN PRISON OFFICIALS REALIZED THEY COULDN’T LEGALLY EXECUTE HIM.
ThankGod Ebhos was a furniture maker in Nigeria. In 1988, he was arrested and accused of taking part in an armed robbery in which the victim was badly injured but miraculously survived.
He spent the next seven years in prison before his trial even began.
In May 1995, a military tribunal, a special court used during military rule, sentenced him to death by firing squad. People convicted by these tribunals had no right to appeal. Human rights groups later raised concerns that confessions obtained during that period, including his, may have been extracted through torture.
Ebhos was moved to Benin Prison to wait for his execution.
He waited nineteen years.
In June 2013, he woke to the sound of the execution room door opening. He recognized the smell of the oil used on the gallows. Prison officers pulled him and four other men from their cells without saying a word and marched them inside. The door locked behind them.
One by one, he watched four men hanged.
He was the fifth.
He was next.
Then everything stopped.
Prison officials realized his death sentence ordered that he be executed by firing squad, not by hanging. Since no firing squad had been arranged, they could not legally carry out his execution that night.
Human rights lawyers acted quickly. The organization Avocats Sans Frontières France took his case to the ECOWAS Court of Justice. In January 2014, the court ordered Nigeria not to execute him. Five months later, it ruled that his name should be removed from death row.
On October 28, 2014, the Governor of Kaduna State used the power of mercy to order his release.
ThankGod Ebhos walked free after spending 26 years in prison, including 19 years on death row, following a trial that took seven years just to begin.
Despite everything, he refused to stop learning. While in prison, he taught himself to read and write. He also learned to play the guitar and the piano.
Years later, he said he still found it hard to believe he had survived that day. For nineteen years, he barely slept, never knowing when the next knock on his cell door would be his last….
