Dear Jonathan,

Thank you so much! This is such lovely news to end the day on! We are so very grateful for your support, which will help us to continue chipping away at injustice and saving lives across the world.

I would love to share a piece of fantastic news from our work in Malawi, where the Supreme Court just ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, in a case we worked on! Together with our partners – the  Cornell Centre on the Death Penalty Worldwide and the Malawi Legal Aid Bureau – Reprieve has been working in Malawi for many years on a resentencing project after the Malawian High Court struck down the mandatory death penalty. Through the project more than 145 individuals who had been sentenced to the mandatory death penalty were released to rebuild their lives. There has been zero reoffending – it’s been an extraordinary demonstration of the power of giving people a second chance, and recognised as such in villages these men have gone back to after spending decades in prison. Now that the death penalty has been abolished altogether in Malawi, we will be working to ensure that this landmark ruling is implemented, and that the final 35 men and women are cleared from Malawi’s death row. You can listen to one of our fellows, Alexious Kamangila, speak about the judgement to the BBC.  It’s such a huge achievement and also really important for our work in other countries in the region, such as Kenya, where we are working on a similar resentencing project for almost 5,000 people who received a now-defunct mandatory death sentence. Among them are people who have strong innocence claims, who were children at the time of their alleged crimes, and many people with mental health illnesses or other mitigating factors and defences which were not taken into account in their original hearing.

Thank you so much again for your ongoing support, which will help to make more successes like these possible. We look forward to being in touch in due course, but please do drop me a line if you ever have any questions about any aspect of our work.

Thanks again and have a lovely evening,

Dixie