Image copyright Bosnia State Prosecutor's Office Image caption Azra Bašić was extradited from the US in 2016 
 
 A court in Bosnia has sentenced a woman known as "the mistress of life and death" to 14 years in prison for war crimes committed in the 1990s. 
 
 Azra Bašić was found guilty of crimes during the Balkan war, including the torture of ethnic-Serb civilians. 
 
 The judge said Bašić was responsible for "particular cruelty" towards those detained by Bosnian-Croat forces. 
 
 Her sentence is the most severe to be handed to a woman for atrocities committed during the Bosnian conflict. 
 
 Bašić, a 58-year-old former member of the Bosnian-Croat forces, is said to have participated in the torture of ethnic-Serb civilians. 
 
 Witnesses said she carved crosses into prisoners' foreheads, forced one man to drink petrol before setting fire to his hands and face, and forced others to crawl naked across broken glass. 
 
 The most serious of her offences was the murder of a restrained prisoner whom she stabbed in the neck, the judge at the Bosnian court said. 
 
 Bašić had been living in the US under an alias for almost 20 years before her arrest in 2011. Friends there said she was "big-hearted" and "a very nice lady". 
 
 On Wednesday, she was found guilty of war crimes against ethnic-Serb civilians detained by Croat forces in April 1992 in and around the northern town of Derventa. 
 
 At least 100,000 people in total died during fighting in the Bosnian war. The conflict lasted nearly four years before a US-brokered peace deal brought it to an end in 1995. 
 
 Biljana Plavšić, the former president of the autonomous Serb region of Republika Srpska, remains the most famous female war criminal of the former Yugoslavia. 
 
 Plavšić, 87, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2003 after pleading guilty at the UN tribunal in The Hague. ||||| SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Bosnia's war crimes court has convicted a former fighter of crimes committed against Bosnian Serb civilians during the country's 1992-95 war. It comes a year after she was extradited from the United States, where she had become a naturalized citizen. 
 
 Azra Basic, a former member of the Croatian and Bosnian Croat armies, was sentenced Wednesday to 14 years in prison for taking part in "killing and inhumane treatment, infliction of great pain and violation of bodily integrity and health" of imprisoned civilians. 
 
 She killed one man by stabbing him in the neck. 
 
 Basic left Bosnia in 1994 and settled in the U.S. She was arrested in Kentucky in 2011 and fought extradition until 2016, when a federal judge approved her deportation. ||||| When Tiffany Cole and Emilia Carr walk down the hall in Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution for Women together, they seem more like smiling girlfriends than convicted felons sitting on death row. 
 
 Cole is now 33, and Carr is now 30. Carr is the youngest woman in the United States sitting on death row, and Cole is the third youngest. The two women are behind bars for committing two separate crimes, and they had separate lives until they arrived as neighbors on the famous death row corridor at the women’s correctional facility in Ocala, Florida. 
 
 “We call it ‘life row,’” Carr said. “It’s life row ... because we’re not dying, we’re living.” 
 
 Carr, who is from Ocala, and Cole, from Jacksonville, Florida, share a similar path. 
 
 Prior to their incarcerations, neither had ever spent a night in jail, they said. Cole played the flute in high school, and participated in cheerleading and Girl Scouts. Carr was book smart and modeled, she said, and was in the school Marines, which was her high school's Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program. 
 
 Both said they were sexually abused and got into trouble after they met the “wrong people.” 
 
 “[I was] looking for love in all the wrong places,” Cole said. 
 
 When she was 25 years old, Cole was convicted on murder charges after being connected to the death of her family’s neighbors, Reggie and Carol Sumner, who suffocated to death from dirt in their lungs when they were buried alive. She has acknowledged she helped dig a grave, but said she thought it would be to hide the items that she, her boyfriend, a guy she had known for three weeks and two of his friends had stolen from their victims. A psychiatrist at Cole’s trial said she suffered from mental problems and had a history of drug and alcohol abuse. 
 
 “I am not the same person anymore,” Cole said. “I have peace, I have joy. I have a sound mind.” 
 
 The jury was shown a damning photo of her celebrating after the crime was committed. She was given the death penalty, which she is in the process of appealing. 
 
 Carr was 26 years old and eight months pregnant with her boyfriend’s child when they were both convicted of suffocating his wife with duct tape and a plastic bag. Carr argued she left the scene before the woman was killed. 
 
 “Wouldn’t there have been physical evidence? I mean, duct tape is some sticky stuff, yet there’s no finger prints, no DNA, no hair,” Carr said. 
 
 But there is video of Carr being interviewing by police, recorded after her boyfriend confessed and implicated her in the crime. On the tape, Carr is heard telling an officer that the boyfriend asked her to “try to snap her neck,” and then Carr says, “I didn’t really try.” 
 
 She was convicted of capital murder and given the death penalty, which she is in the process of appealing. 
 
 Legal experts say the average appeals process takes 10 to 12 years for death row inmates. Carr has been on death row for four years, while Cole has been on death row for seven years. 
 
 Both women are reluctant to give details about their cases under appeal, but both insist the murders they were convicted of were done at the hand of their boyfriends, not them. Both say they are not arguing for their release, just for their lives, to have their executions stayed. 
 
 Both refuse to believe they will be executed. 
 
 “You can’t have that mentality, because that means you've accepted this,” Carr said. 
 
 “You've already died... you’re already dead,” if you accept that, Cole said. 
 
 In response to Cole appealing her conviction, the prosecutor who handled her case, Jay Plotkin, said in a statement to ABC News, “I was a prosecutor for more than 20 years. There was not any case that I prosecuted where the crime was more vile or cruel than the torture and murder of the Sumners. This case lingers on in the heart and soul of our community. Ms. Cole is certainly entitled to, and should, exhaust all of her legal rights to appeal. I am personally confident that she received more than adequate representation and a fair trial.” 
 
 The prosecutor in Carr’s case, Rock Hooker, declined to comment to ABC News while the appeals process was still pending. 
 
 According to the National Academy of Sciences, one in 25 people on death row is innocent. 
 
 Thirty-five states have death penalty statues, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics from December 2014, and Florida is one of five states, along with California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Alabama, that hold 60 percent of the nation’s inmates on death row. 
 
 “It’s legal murder,” Cole said. 
 
 “How many rich people go to prison?” Carr asked. “We’re all minorities. We’re all people who are either minorities or didn’t have any, any money, any way to say, ‘Hey, let me buy my freedom,’ because it’s not free in this country. Unfortunately, equality is an illusion.” 
 
 Seventy-five percent of Americans accused of a crime cannot afford a private attorney, with racial minorities being the majority of those who cannot afford one. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 79 percent of state public defender systems were overloaded. 
 
 For years, Carr and Cole have been locked in their cells 24 hours a day. Three times a week, they are allowed to go outside for two hours at a time -- on concrete, not grass. 
 
 “I haven't touched grass in six years,” Carr said. “So it’s the small stuff you take for granted, you really do.” 
 
 Carr has four children, but she is forbidden from seeing them. 
 
 “I think about them every day,” she said. “Before I really even came to know God, that was the hardest thing for me to cope with day in and day out, was being away from my kids. ... When I got here, my hair was falling out just from stress.” 
 
 Both Carr and Cole say they try to do something useful with their time behind bars. Carr reads everything she can from history to science fiction. 
 
 “I'm reading on Native Americans in Florida, but I'm trying to get some stuff on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,” she said. “I love history.” 
 
 The women say self-help books and religion have changed everything for them. They have even put religious songs to a kind of dance and, from time to time, they share small moments when they sing and laugh together. 
 
 “We’re not just up here doing nothing,” Carr said. “We’re up here living and, you know, finding joy in a situation like this and praising God in the process, you know, and just showing people. We’re people.” 
 
 “It’s not over,” Cole said. “There is forgiveness and there is hope.”
– She was a middle-aged woman working at a Nestle plant in Kentucky when she was arrested in 2011, but Azra Basic had a much darker past. On Wednesday, a war crimes court in Sarajevo sentenced the 58-year-old to 14 years in prison for torturing and killing civilians during the Balkan war of the 1990s, reports the BBC. During that conflict, Basic had the nickname of "mistress of life and death" as she oversaw the treatment of Serbs detained by Bosnian-Croat forces. The details are grisly. Prosecutors say Basic forced prisoners to crawl over broken glass, killed one detainee by stabbing him in the neck, carved crosses into prisoners' foreheads, forced one man to drink gasoline before setting his hands and face on fire, and more. Basic left for the US in 1994, settled in Kentucky under an alias, and became a naturalized US citizen in 2007, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader. She was arrested four years later by US federal marshals and eventually lost a legal battle to avoid extradition to Bosnia-Herzegovina for trial. Her 14-year sentence is the longest given to a woman for atrocities during the Balkan war. The court convicted her of "killing and inhumane treatment, infliction of great pain and violation of bodily integrity and health" of imprisoned civilians, per the AP.