SENTENCED. John Cordeiro, 24; Victor Raposo, 23; and Daniel Silva, 27; Portuguese immigrant laborers who were convicted in a nationally televised trial of gang raping a woman in a neighborhood tavern; each to nine to twelve years in prison; in Fall River, Mass. A fourth defendant, Joseph Vieira, 28, received six to eight years on the same aggravated rape charge.

SENTENCED. Mary Evans, 27, Tennessee lawyer who helped her client, Convicted Felon William Timothy Kirk, escape from the Brushy Mountain state penitentiary in March 1983 and was captured with him 139 days later in Florida; to three years in prison; in Clinton, Tenn.

DIED. Ronald O'Bryan, 39, the so-called Candy Man killer, who was convicted in 1975 of poisoning his eight-year-old son with cyanide-laced Halloween sweets; by execution (a lethal injection of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride); in Huntsville, Texas.

DIED. Ahmed Sekou Toure, 62, President of Guinea; during emergency heart surgery; in Cleveland (see WORLD).

DIED. Luigi Barzini, 75, Italian journalist, author and politician; of lung cancer; in Rome. The urbane, elegant Barzini was best known for The Italians (1964) and The Europeans (1983), which solidified his reputation as a self-styled interpreter of America for Italians and Italy for Americans.

DIED. Karl Rahner, 80, Roman Catholic theologian who ranks as one of the century's most influential religious thinkers; of a heart attack; in Innsbruck, Austria. Born in Freiburg, Germany, Rahner entered the Jesuit order in 1922 and established himself as a brilliant modern interpreter of St. Thomas Aquinas. The author of nearly 4,000 publications, Rahner was an influential behind-the-scenes presence at the Second Vatican Council.

DIED. Benjamin E. Mays, 89, civil rights advocate and president (1940-67) of Morehouse College, a leading black educational institution; in Atlanta. The son of sharecroppers, Mays once told his students, "They can make you sit in the back of the streetcar, but no one can confine a mind." One Morehouse graduate who took that advice to heart was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who called Mays "my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father."