Team Jesus, please pray for justice to prevail for Sunday Jackson!!! Yes! Please put Sunday Jackson on your prayer list and on your Church’s prayer list! Thank you!
Baptist Press
By Diana Chandler, posted March 13, 2025 in International News, Persecution
ADAMAWA STATE, Nigeria (BP) – Nigerian Christian leaders are seeking clemency for a Christian farmer given the death sentence for killing a Fulani herdsman during an attack on his farm, as widely reported.
The Nigerian Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of March 7, 2025 for Sunday Jackson, a farmer in Adamawa, who was a 20-year-old student with a pregnant wife when Fulani herdsmen attacked him on the couple’s farm. As Ardo Bawuro stabbed Jackson in the head and leg, according to Jackson’s published account, Jackson managed to wrest Bawuro’s knife from him and fatally stab the herdsman.
At the initial trial in 2021, Justice Fatima Ahmed Tafida, a Muslim, sentenced Jackson to death, interpreting the law to mean he should have fled the altercation.
Leaders of the Northern Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), representing 19 state chapters of the multi-denominational group, expressed concern that the nation’s highest court could accept the ruling, describing it as glaring evidence of discrimination against a Christian who will be hanged to death after being attacked by an armed Fulani herdsman without provocation and responding in self-defense, Christian Daily International – Morning Star News (CDI-Morning Star) reported March 12, 2025.
Northern CAN Chairman John Hayab and Mohammed Naga, CAN’s secretary general for northern Nigeria, described the death sentence as a “grave travesty of justice” and a misinterpretation of Section 23 of Adamawa State Penal Code Laws.
To conclude “that Sunday Jackson had the option of flight when he was attacked and injured on his leg and not to fight in self-defense clearly distorted logic on its head by saying plaintiff should have run away while having admitted into evidence that he was stabbed in the leg and thus momentarily handicapped,” the CAN leaders said in a statement.
The leaders joined Jackson in asking Adamawa State Gov. Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri to grant him a pardon.
“Mr. Sunday Jackson has truly been subjected to the excruciating pain of waiting for death in the midst of the shadow of death by the grave travesty of the misinterpretation of Section 23 of the Adamawa State Penal Code Laws,” CAN said, “and the unnecessary prolonged trial that lasted six and half years, which ordinarily should not have lasted such a lengthy period.” More Here
