Most of them were sentenced due to their involvement in an unsuccessful coup attempt against President Sir Dawda Jawara which took place on July 30, 1981.
In September 1985,the then President Sir Dawda Jawara announced publicly that he was personally opposed to the death penalty.
In February 1992, the Supreme Court of The Gambia found them guilty of "assault occasioning bodily harm" and sentenced them to three years' imprisonment; a third officer was acquitted.
The Gambian Parliament passed bills to remove the country's death penalty laws from their criminal code in April 1993 by overwhelmingly supportive margins.
Gambian officials transported the bodies out of the prison via van,[14] but they refused to disclose the locations where they had buried the executed inmates.
[15] The executions were criticized for several reasons, with one being that at least three of the inmates (Malang Sonko, Tabara Samba, and Abubacar Yarbo) had not yet exhausted their appeals or had their cases heard by the Supreme Court of the Gambia, which was a violation of the Gambian Constitution.
"[17] Several of the inmates, particularly those convicted of treason and other political crimes, were alleged to have not received fair, traditional trials or due process.
[18] On behalf of the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Christof Heyns, assigned by the UN, sent a message to then-President Jammeh to condemn the completed and planned executions.
In October of the same year, however, the Gambian Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for treason, albeit not in Amadou Janneh's case, and his life sentence was allowed to stand.
[4] On 21 September 2017, Gambian President Adama Barrow signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
[19] On February 18, 2018, while commemorating the 53rd anniversary of The Gambia's independence from the British Empire, Barrow announced an official moratorium on executions.
The gesture was also part of Barrow's attempt to rebuild and introduce human rights reforms after the removal of authoritarian President Jammeh, a proponent of the death penalty, the previous year.
[20] In September of the same year, Gambia also formally ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Alongside the commutations, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubacar Tambadou, announced The Gambia's commitment to abolishing the death penalty permanently.
[21] Tambadou also acknowledged that public opinion on the death penalty among Gambian citizens is split and that the country is awaiting the results of a report by the Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) before taking further steps on the future of capital punishment.