Throughout the following decades, death sentences were occasionally handed down to those convicted of terrorist offenses, but these sentences were always commuted. In 1988 John Demjanjuk, a guard in a Nazi death camp during the war nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible" by inmates for his brutality, was sentenced to death after being convicted of war crimes, but his conviction was later overturned on appeal. In the mid-1990s the practice of seeking the death penalty for those facing terrorism charges ceased.[12]