Sentence
On 18 February 2002, Speight was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to a charge of treason. However the government of the Prime Minister Hon. Laisenia Qarase had abolished the death sentence in the House of Representatives on the day that Speight was sentenced.
President Ratu Josefa Iloilo, who had replaced Mara following the coup, followed the advice of the Prime Minister and commuted Speight's sentence to life imprisonment. Speight started serving his sentence on Nukulau Island where he had been living out his exile. Following the decision of the Military government to close the Nukulau facility Speight was transferred on 20 December 2006. He is currently serving out his sentence at the Nuboro Maximum Security Prison.
Read more about this topic: George Speight
Famous quotes containing the word sentence:
“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“When one drinks with a friend, a thousand cups are not enough, but when there is no meeting of minds, half a sentence can be too much.”
—Chinese proverb.