The son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been sentenced to ninety-seven years in prison for mutilations and executions carried out in Liberia, in the first US prosecution for torture committed abroad. Charles “Chuckie” Taylor, Jr., was convicted in October by a jury in Miami, Florida on eight torture and conspiracy charges for killings, beatings and atrocities committed while he headed a paramilitary force in Liberia. The charges said he and his colleagues burned their victims with hot irons, molten wax and boiling water and applied electric shocks to their genitals. The thirty-one-year-old Taylor is a US citizen who was born in Boston. Taylor was the first person charged under a 1994 extraterritorial torture statute, which allows prosecutors to charge a US citizen or someone present in the United States with acts of torture or conspiracy to torture outside the country.
From Democracy Now!
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