Amnesty International representatives paid a visit to Kenny Richey, the Scottish citizen who has been on Ohio's death row for the past 17 years. They say he is "treated like a rabid animal."

Richey is living in “inhuman, barbaric, macabre and degrading” conditions in Mansfield Correctional Institute, according to Scottish LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael and the head of Amnesty International UK, Kate Allen, both of whom visited him on Thursday.

Richey, 39, was cuffed, with the manacles locked to a waist-chain, during the visit. His ankles were shackled and he was tethered to the floor. Allen said Richey was “treated like a rabid animal”. He receives little or no medical or dental care and, according to Carmichael, had been forced to improvise a false tooth using part of a plastic fork.

“Death row is horrific,” said Carmichael. “The brutality is inescapable. As a student I worked on a pig farm. Kenny was tethered like the sows we kept locked in sheds. We abolished that as it was inhuman. I saw him and thought that they do to him what we don’t let farmers do to animals.

Then they met "Death Row Barb."

“The most surreal moment was when we walked on to death row and a warden introduced us to the death row secretary – a woman in her 60s. He said ‘this is death row Barb’. The staff are totally desensitised.’’

Amnesty describes Richey’s case as “one of the most compelling cases of apparent innocence that human rights campaigners have ever seen”.

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