Sipho Agmatir Thwala was sentenced in Durban on March 29, 1999 to 506 years in prison, one of the longest terms ever handed down in South Africa. The figure was reported around the world. It is also, as a description of how long he will be held, meaningless. South African law requires that a prisoner serving a determinate sentence be considered for parole once twenty-five years of the sentence, or of cumulative sentences, have been served, however long the sentence is. Counting from his arrest in August 1997, Thwala reached that point in 2022.
This archive holds more than a thousand entries, and the sentence figure is the single fact most likely to be wrong in the reader's head. Not wrong on the page. The courts said what the pages say. The gap is between the number a court pronounces and the date a man walks out, and those are two different facts in almost every legal system on earth. Which way they diverge, and by how much, depends entirely on where the trial happened.
THE NUMBER THAT WAS NEVER A TERM
Alfredo Galan shot six people in and around Madrid in 2003 and was sentenced to 142 years and three months. Spanish law as it stood at the time of the offences capped the effective term at twenty-five years however many sentences were accumulated. He is expected to be released around 2028, aged about fifty. Raul Osiel Marroquin received 300 years in Mexico City. Antonio Luis Costa received twenty-five in Portugal, which sounds moderate until you learn it is the Portuguese maximum and that the country has no life sentence at all.
South Africa produces the purest version of this. Bulelani Mabhayi was given twenty-five life sentences in 2013. Stewart Wilken was given seven in 1998. The stacking changes the sentence on paper and does not move the date by a day, because the statute fixes parole consideration at a point that does not care how many life terms were imposed. A court that hands down twenty-five life sentences is making a statement, not a calculation.
THE SENTENCE THAT HAD ALREADY ENDED
Charles Sobhraj was convicted in Nepal on August 20, 2004 of the 1975 murder of the American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich, and sentenced to life imprisonment. It was the first time in his life that any court had found him guilty of murder, against twenty or more deaths attributed to him across Asia. A second Nepali court convicted him in 2014 of murdering her Canadian companion Laurent Carriere, ten years after the first trial, for a killing committed in the same year. A life sentence in Nepal is twenty years. On December 21, 2022 the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered his release under the provision covering prisoners who have served three quarters of a sentence. He was freed two days later, deported, and landed in Paris on Christmas Eve. He has been at liberty in France ever since, barred from returning to Nepal for ten years, and he is eighty-two.
THE SENTENCE THAT WAS REPLACED WITHOUT ANYONE WRITING IT DOWN
Andrei Maslich was sentenced to death in Russia in 1995 and again in 1996, for stranglings committed while he was already in custody. No one has been executed in Russia since 1996. The Constitutional Court barred the imposition of death sentences on February 2, 1999, and on June 3 that year a presidential decree commuted every remaining death sentence to either life imprisonment or a term of twenty-five years.
Which of the two Maslich received is not recorded in any source available here, and the difference is total. Twenty-five years from the mid-1990s expired around 2020. He is either in a special regime colony for the rest of his life or he has been a free man for six years, and the public record does not say. The same question is open for Vladimir Mukhankin, sentenced to death in 1997.
THE MINIMUM TERM NOBODY WRITES DOWN
Guy Georges was sentenced in Paris on April 5, 2001 to life with a minimum of twenty-two years. In France that minimum is a periode de surete, a bar on every form of release while it runs. Once it expires the prisoner may ask a court for conditional release, on evidence of reintegration and an assessment of dangerousness. Georges reached that point in 2020, counting from his arrest in March 1998. Patrice Alegre, also given twenty-two years, reached it in 2019. Twenty-two is not a figure either court chose freely. It is what French law sets where the offender is a legal recidivist.
John Martin Crawford was convicted of three murders in Saskatchewan in 1996 and given life with no parole for twenty-five years. A Canadian life sentence never expires, and twenty-five years is the earliest the Parole Board may consider release, not a release date. His twenty-five years ran out around 2021. In 2022, in R v Bissonnette, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down consecutive parole ineligibility periods for multiple murders, holding that a sentence with no realistic possibility of parole is incompatible with human dignity. Twenty-five years is now the constitutional ceiling in Canada, and the ruling applied retroactively.
Robert John Maudsley has been in an English prison since 1974 and in solitary confinement for most of it. He has never been convicted of murder. His detention rests on a manslaughter conviction in 1977 and three killings in custody. A life sentence in England and Wales carries a tariff, and after it the Parole Board decides; a whole life order is the separate thing that removes release altogether. Which of the two applies to Maudsley is not recorded here, and it is the only question about him that matters.
WHERE THE SENTENCE MEANS WHAT IT SAYS
Robert Joe Wagner received ten consecutive terms of life imprisonment in South Australia in September 2003 for his part in the Snowtown killings. No non-parole period was set on any of them. Most Australian life sentences carry one, running from ten to thirty years depending on the state, and the prisoner may then apply. Where none is fixed there is nothing to apply for. Wagner will be held until he dies unless the executive intervenes through the royal prerogative of mercy, which is a mechanism of last resort and almost never used.
Masumi Hayashi has been under sentence of death in Japan since December 10, 2002. Japan retains capital punishment and uses it. Executions are by hanging, carried out in secrecy at irregular intervals, and the prisoner is told on the morning of the day, roughly an hour beforehand. More than a hundred people are held under sentence and a wait of decades is ordinary. Kanae Kijima, sentenced in 2012, has maintained her innocence throughout and her conviction was built on circumstantial evidence. She has now spent fourteen years being told, every morning, that today is not necessarily the day.
WHY THIS IS WORTH KNOWING
The obvious reading is that long sentences are theatre, and for South Africa and Spain that is close to true. Australia and Japan are the reason it is not the whole story. Wagner's ten life sentences and Mabhayi's twenty-five look like the same gesture and mean opposite things: in South Africa the stacking is empty because the statute caps consideration regardless, and in Australia the stacking is beside the point because the absence of a minimum term is what closes the door.
So the useful rule is not that sentences are exaggerated. It is that a sentence figure is a statement made by a court in one legal system, and it cannot be read across into another, or into ordinary language, without knowing the rule that governs it. Twenty-five years in Portugal is the most the state can do. Twenty-five years in South Africa is what 506 years turns into. A hundred and forty-two years in Spain is twenty-five. Ten life sentences in Australia is until you die.
Every one of these men is on this site with a page of his own, and until this month most of those pages gave the number and stopped.