Stoning victims to death is outrageous

Earlier in this century, Iran offered to host a UN congress on justice and crime prevention. However, when a number of countries and other participants informed the UN that it would not participate in the congress if it was held in Iran, the venue was changed to another country.

The reason for the dissatisfaction of the potential participants of the congress was that Iran has a terrible record on human rights. It is in that country that homosexuals are publicly hanged, even when they are as young as sixteen. It is also the country that executes adulterers by publicly stoning them to death. Iranian judges appear to think there is nothing wrong in meting out that kind of death sentence despite the fact that there is a moratorium in Iran on stoning as a means of enforcing the death penalty.

It is easy to understand why countries around the world that endorse human rights, would not want to enter a country whose human rights abuses are based on the thinking of judges and others in Iran that is from the Dark Ages.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, a mother of two, was found guilty of adultery and complicity of murder by an Iranian court in a language she didn't understand. Her first language is Azerbaijani and she only speaks limited Farsi, the language of the prosecutors and the courts. She did not understand that ‘rajm’, a word borrowed from Arabic, meant stoning, and she fainted when told by a fellow prisoner what it really meant.

Stoning for adultery has been part of Iran's Islamic Penal Code since 1983, but even within the country it has been hugely controversial. The ruling ayatollahs and political class have debated for years about a possible end to a practice that has become an embarrassment to the regime. But despite official government moratoriums on stoning, it is still carried out and judges continue to hand down the sentence for adultery. It does not however include premarital sex or homosexual acts, although this too is illegal under most interpretations of Muslim laws.

Ashtiani's case has become a cause celebre in part because her son and daughter (at risk to themselves) have publicly proclaimed not only her innocence, but the inhumanity of the sentence.

Despite the worldwide condemnation, Iran is refusing to bow to international pressure and there have been contradictory claims from Iranian officials about the sentence. In a possible sign of the conflict dividing pro-and anti-stoning camps when one official said Ashtiani’s sentence had been suspended and then said that the suspension was denied the next day.

The Saudi ambassador to London asserted that stoning adulterers to death is a legitimate punishment for society.

On a trip to New York in November 2010, Javad Larijani, chief of Iran's Human Rights Council, defended the practice. According to Iran's state-run Raja News, he said, “The punishment by stoning is only a small part of our extensive punishment laws. We are proud of having such a system.” He added that stoning adulterers to death acts as a deterrent.

Now as you read his following statement, consider the mentality of this man. He said, “More than 50% may not die if stoning is employed. Stoning means you should do a number of acts, by throwing the stone in a limited number (of times) in a special way. In the eyes of some people, stoning is a lesser punishment than execution because there is a chance you could survive.”

That’s strange because if anyone survived a stoning, the world would have heard about it and that information has never been publicized.

Those able to escape the hole during stoning can be freed after confessing to their crimes according to Islamic law, a feat that is much more difficult for women than for men because so much more of their body is covered during lapidation.

I would think that it is impossible for women to get themselves out of the hole and extremely difficult for the men to get out of the hole also because both the men and the women are tightly wrapped from head to foot in cloth and then rocks the size of baseballs are poured into the hole thereby surrounding their bodies so that they are tightly secured in the hole. Since their feet are bound and their hands are tied behind their backs, it would seem to be impossible for the condemned persons to escape their fate.

Ms. Mohammadi Ashtiani's high-profile case is one of only many stonings in Iran since the practice was reintroduced following the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Since 1980, at least 150 men and women have been stoned to death in Iran, according to Farshad Hoseini, head of the International Committee against Execution, who has compiled a report on the practice from media reports and human rights organizations. It should be pointed out however that obtaining a true and complete list of the victims is extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, due to Iran’s regime's systematic censorship of such news.

Hoseini added, “Stoning in Iran is a political tool in the hands of an Islamic regime to oppress the society as a whole in one of the most savage ways. The overwhelming majority of the victims of stoning are women. Stoning in Iran is therefore a tool, among many such religious, oppressive tools, for keeping women in their place.”

Stoning to death for adultery, although technically admissible for both sexes, has also been carried out mainly against women. There is no excuse for the killing of women in the name of any ‘religion’, ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’. ‘Religion’ and ‘culture’ cannot and must not be invoked as excuse for the killing of women, because religion and the laws which derive from it are always subjective interpretations. Stoning men and women is a brutal and cruel example of how culture and religion are being misused to perpetuate violence against human beings.

On the face of things, stoning is not a gendered punishment, for the law stipulates that adulterous men face the same brutal end. But because Iranian law permits polygamy, it effectively offers men an escape route. They are able to claim that their adulterous relationship was, in fact, a temporary marriage (Iranian law recognizes “marriages” of even a few hours duration between men and single women). Men typically exploit this escape clause, and are rarely sentenced to stoning. But married women accused of adultery have no access to such a way out.

Now what follows is an example as to just how screwed up Iran’s justice system is.

Ms. Mohammadi Ashtiani, who lives in the northwest part of Iran and is a member of the Azerbaijani minority, was convicted in 2006 of complicity in the murder of her husband. For the crime of murder, she was jailed for ten years.

She was also initially convicted of ‘having illicit relations’ with two men and flogged 99 times. However, she was later found guilty of ‘adultery while married,’ and that crime got her the sentence of ‘death by stoning’. The Koran forbids all sexual intercourse outside the marital bond as sinful, but makes no distinction between adultery and fornication—and in both cases the punishment is flogging for those found guilty. Stoning (rajm) as a punishment for adultery is not mentioned in the Koran.

Since worldwide attention has been focused on the case this year, the Iranian authorities have become defensive and contradictory. According to Amnesty, one official said she could still face trial for murder; despite being already convicted and if found guilty, she could be hanged. This sentence would take precedence over any punishment for adultery such as stoning.

The woman was paraded before television reporters to confess to her crime and to deny reports she had been flogged a ‘second’ time. Public confessions in Iran are about as meaningless as statements by the Flat Earth Society.

Her lawyer, Houtan Kian, told Britain's Guardian newspaper, “She was severely beaten up and tortured until she agreed to appear in front of camera (and confess).
The case has even been raised by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, who used it as an example to attack the West. He said that Ashtiani was still under investigation and denounced the U.S. outcry over her sentence.

Asked about international appeals for her sentence to be commuted, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, "I want to make my own appeal. In the United States there are 53 women condemned to death. Why is the whole world not asking them to pardon these women? We handed to them a list of these women but the media is in their hands and this is why they are not covering this question."

That question is easy to answer. The U.S doesn’t stone condemned women to death, stoning that can on occasion; take as long as two hours before the victim finally succumbs.

The Iranian President's comments could be seen as an attempt to deflect attention from a death penalty method that is unpopular domestically.

Ahmad Fatemi, a board member of the International Committee Against Stoning and an Iranian political exile now living in Sweden said, “There are cases where people have attacked the executors and released the victim, the person who was to be executed by stoning.”

Since the start of a four-year moratorium on stonings from 2002-06; which observers believe was not actually honoured; the Iranian regime has conducted stonings in secret whereas they were formerly public events. Human rights observers describe clandestine gatherings, where the stone-throwers are recruits from the Basij, a corps of loosely organized semi-vigilante shock troops loyal to the regime.

On their way to inflicting an ancient punishment, stone throwers nowadays reportedly have had their cell phones and any recording equipment confiscated to prevent the outside world from witnessing the practice.

The purpose of stonings is to create fear and act as a deterrent. Conducting them in secret defeats the purpose of deterrence. It makes it possible that such executions won’t cause further embarrassment to the regime. As a consequence, many people in Iran believe the anti-stoning faction of Iran's elite will soon win the debate.

In 2007, Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, a renegade reformist mullah and former Grand Council member now retired from office, publicly issued a fatwa calling for an end to stoning. He said, “There are cracks inside the regime. Critics within their own ranks write against (stoning), they think this is stupid. They (note the West) uses it as a propaganda tool against Islam and so on," He concluded that politically, “it is not possible to execute Sakineh (Mohammadi Ashtiani) in the foreseeable future.”

We will have to wait and see if his prophecy is correct. Ann Harrison, Amnesty International's London-based Iran researcher, agreed that the fear of embarrassment seems to be turning Iran away from stonings. She said, “Our understanding is the authorities are trying to find ways to end stoning and one of the proposals has been that stoning sentences be changed to executions by hanging.”

There is a possibility that she might be executed by hanging. It may be that the authorities are trying to portray her as a murderer so that if she is hanged, people in Iran would think she's being hanged for murder when in fact she's actually being hanged for adultery. Once sentenced, the sentence can’t be changed without first a court hearing an appeal. An appeal in an Iranian court for mercy in Iran is not unlike entering a singing contest before judges who are stone deaf.

Rules & Regulations

From conviction to execution, the practice of stoning is carefully regulated and codified under a set of articles listed in the Islamic Penal Code.
Conviction

According to many interpretations of Islamic Law (including the Iranian Penal Code), proving adultery is very difficult under Iranian law and a guilty sentence is nearly impossible to obtain through hard evidence.

The accused must confess four times, or the act must have been witnessed in the flesh by at least ‘four just men’ or ‘three just men and two just women.’ Witnesses are officially encouraged to be sure of their story; they can be flogged for testimony deemed false. In reality, prosecutions for adultery succeed in Iran through a legal loophole. Under ‘judge's knowledge’ or ‘judge's finding,’ if a judge believes adultery took place, he can add the force of his opinion to the documentary evidence and find the defendant guilty. According to the International Committee Against Execution, between one and 12 people are executed by stoning in Iran each year for adultery, and a further 23 have been condemned to die this way.

Exemptions & possible redemption

Since the age of majority under Iranian law is 9 years for girls and 15 for boys, it is theoretically possible children of those ages would be condemned to death by stoning. Article 49 exempts children from punishment. Addendum 1 to this article defines a child as someone before puberty. But in the civil law puberty for boys is fifteen and for girls, it is nine. (article 1210, addendum 1). So girls come of age for punishments six years before boys. Human rights activists believe the youngest people to receive the sentence were 15 or 16, and had turned 18 by the time any sentence was carried out, although they acknowledge that reliable, comprehensive information about the Iranian justice system is hard to come by. Azar Baqeri was jailed when she was 15 because her husband filed a complaint against her and has been sentenced to stoning. She is currently 19 and still in prison waiting for the sentence to be carried out.

Article 4 of the code says that if the person sentenced to death pleads for mercy after the final confirmation of the sentence, but prior to execution, then the execution of the punishment will be delayed by order of the court issuing the sentence until the result is announced by the Commission of Amnesty and Clemency. The commission is obliged to urgently process the plea. The condemned can live in realistic hope, as senior Iranian judges do sometimes commute stoning sentences.

Article 5 says the advent of insanity, apostasy, sickness, or menstruation of the condemned will not prevent the execution. However, Article 6 says, "During pregnancy and lochia (bleeding after childbirth), death penalty, adultery punishments, and life retribution shall not be carried out." After giving birth, ‘if execution of the sentence would harm the health of the child due to weaning from mother's breast milk,’ a woman's execution could be delayed until the baby reaches the age of two.

The stone throwers

Observers believe that since 2006, stone-throwers have tended to be recruited from volunteer paramilitary groups, collectively the Basij, who often serve as the front line in the violent suppression of popular uprisings. While human rights activists assume adult men comprise the bulk of stone-throwers, Basij units made up of women and youths are documented. It is not known what age or gender restrictions, if any, govern stoning crews in contemporary Iran. Video evidence shows circles of what appear to be mostly men standing a few metres away from the victim as the stoning takes place.

I would be less than honest if I didn’t add that Iran isn’t the only country that approves of stoning as a means of executing people. It is also done in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Somalia.
Method of execution carried out in Iran

Those sentenced to stoning, or ‘lapidation’ as it is also called, are buried in a hole and covered with soil (men up to their waists; women to a line above their breasts), according to Article 102 of the Islamic Penal Code. A selected group then executes the alleged adulterers using rocks.

Size of stones

The law specifies the size of the stones in Sharia Law in Iran to ensure the execution does not take too long or occur too quickly. A stone that is two and three-quarter inches in diameter is the proper size. Anything larger would bring about a quicker death and anything smaller would prolong the death.

In summary

How can society in general stop the Iranian judges from issuing death sentences by stoning their condemned prisoners? The answer to that question is just as allusive as the answer to the question, “How do we stop foxes from eating chickens in the hen house?

The Iranian government should move in a direction that advocates justice and mercy. And until the people of Iran stop electing fools like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, many people in Iran sentenced to death for adultery will continue to suffer terribly while being slowly stoned to death.