Iran orders 99 lashes for woman facing execution, rights group says

[mike r]

Source: CNN

An Iranian woman who'd already been condemned to death faces another sentence of 99 lashes because of a case of mistaken identity in a photograph, according to foes of the execution. Iranian authorities imposed the sentence after they saw the photo of a woman without a head scarf in a newspaper, the International Committee Against Stoning, a human rights group, said Friday.

In an apology, The Times of London, which ran the photo on its front page on August 28, said the woman was wrongly identified as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had previously been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. The Times said the photo actually is of Susan Hejrat, a political activist living in Sweden. Iranian law requies all women, regardless of their faith, to wear garments that cover their hair and bodies.

According to the Times, one of Ashtiani's former lawyers, Mohammed Mostafaei, gave the paper the photo. Mostafaei told CNN Saturday that he still thinks the photo may be of his former client. The Times said Mostafei told it that Ashtiani's son, Sajjad, 22, had e-mailed him two photographs three months ago and told him both were of his mother. "One was the widely used picture of Ms. Ashtiani with her face obscured by a chador , and the other was the one used by The Times ... That showed the full face of a woman," The Times said in a statement Friday.

Sajjad Ghaderzadeh wrote in an open letter that another lawyer sent the paper an authentic photo of his mother, but that it did not appear in the Times article. The letter was circulated by the International Committee Against Stoning on Friday. "We do not know how that picture was originally obtained, nor to whom the picture belongs," Ghaderzadeh said in the letter...

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/09/04/iran.stoning/?hpt=T1

[DavidDvorkin]

1. I'm sure it's a mistranslation.

[aquart]

2. Any man who beats a woman

needs to have his dangling parts removed, sauteed, and fed to him.

Any man who ORDERS a woman to be beaten needs to be tied one limb to each of four horses.

What men do to each other is appalling enough. When they do it to women, they violate the intentions of evolution and they need to be removed from the chain of descent.

[Brooklyns_Finest]

4. Ma'am

Looks like you believe in sharia law. You would make a great mullah.

[Demit]

5. I suspect that sharia law, having been written by men, wouldn't dream of punishing men so harshly.

I doubt that aquart was expressing herself literally. Looks like that, sir, went over your head.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Trajan]

27. I find that response extreme as well ...

I despise stoning ...

I despise lashing ...

I despise the 'quartering' of human beings by tying human limbs to 4 different horses, and pulling ... hard ....

I despise the purposeful mutilation of another human being for the purpose of punishment ...

The poster seems reasonable to point out the irrationality of the response ...


Why say something like that here if you don't actually mean it ? ... That kind of hateful reaction reveals the inner self, even if one doesn't actually wish such retribution to be carried out in reality ...

[superconnected]

29. I consider that reaction fair and just. Often people who hurt others won't learn until they are hurt

themselves. I agree completely that these men invoking these tortures and murder on women should get the same treatment. But then I'm also pro-death penalty. Some peoples' crimes are just so bad that I can guess the only way for them to get a clue is for it to happen to them. I mean, most of us won't hurt others because of empathy - it would hurt us too. The empathy lackers may learn better if what they do to others is foisted upon them.

[Bobbieo]

3. Does this Iranian dress code also apply to diplomats wives or female

employees?

[KakistocracyHater]

7. in all the Jesus movies they showed 30 lashing, so put that brutal image

beside 99 lashings, they really hate women over there & I despise them for their savagery.

[snot]

8. Really? We can't net 5 recs against superfluous torture?

[rpannier]

9. I gave it 5

on edit: as response 1 wrote there will be several here that will believe it was a bad translation
Several who will claim it's a CIA trick
And a group who will say, "What about what the US has done!"

[Quantess]

10. And yet we're supposed to believe that women wear burqas voluntarily.

[smalll]

12. Muslims tend not to be straight white Anglo-Saxon protestant men --

so ipso facto, anything they do amongst themselves is just a refreshingly authentic expression of a vibrant, indigenous culture. They're the fucking Na'vi, man! Of COURSE the wearing of the burqa is a voluntary choice made by each particular Muslim woman who choses to wear it -- usually for satisfyingly feminist reasons -- why else would they do so? Everyone knows evil white Europeans were the inventors and sole exponents of patriarchal oppression!

;)

[burnsei sensei]

16. For those who worship at the multicultural shrine . . .

all religions, cultures and societies are basically the same.
So stop complaining and allow these rural Iranian authorities their pound of flesh.
Hath not an Iranian eyes? . . .
If you prick us, do we not bleed . . .
If you wrong us, will we not avenge? . . .
The whole world is out to lunch.

[Quantess]

25. Hello. You seem amusing.

I want to meet you.

[burnsei sensei]

33. Of course I didn't really mean

to allow the Iranians their "pound of flesh," but I'm at a loss as to what the rest of the world can do about this situation and others like it.
Remember that it's in the rural districts of Iran, where people are more isolated, that these things are going on.
These are abuses of human rights to us.
As far as the Iranians are concerned, they are keeping order.
The reason or unreason of their system is irrelevant because the law is based on faith.
One tenet of multiculturalism is that all cultures and religions are basically the same.
Obviously, they are not.
So I don't worship at the shrine of multiculturalism. I think it's a collective self-deception.

[LostinVA]

38. +1

[smalll]

11. Marvelous. And anyone who is less than perfectly sanguine about the Muslim religion --

is just a bigot! A bigot, I say!

:hide:

[burnsei sensei]

22. +1 nt

[madrchsod]

13. this is what happens to any society that is ruled by ....

religious fundamentalists who use their power to usurp the law to suppress human rights.

the christian fundamentalists are trying to do the same thing here in the usa.

[burnsei sensei]

17. Study medieval Christendom.

There was much about "justice" back then that was not rational.
There was, for instance, trial by ordeal.
But I don't think women were routinely buried up to their shoulders and stoned to death.
In fact, I think in most urban environs, that sort of behavior is discouraged.
They say it makes society more disorderly.
Public executions are not done any more-- why?
Because it was found as time went on that they made society more disorderly, not less so.
They encouraged crime by hardening the people to it.
The dynamic is no different here.

[PavePusher]

20. You're right. Christianity did not historically stone women to death.

We tied them to stakes and burned them as witches, or beheaded or hanged them, or drowned them.

It's more progressive, dontchyaknow.

[burnsei sensei]

21. The only thing that made it more progressive

was the refusal to do such things in the 18th-19th centuries.
Don't dream the Enlightenment didn't exist.
It changed everything and nothing, in that the outrages of the society generally in the Middle Ages were carried on against slaves in modernity.
Our society is progressive because it became ashamed of such things and abandoned them.
Progress has nothing to do with what you do.
It has to do with what you abandoned in the past and why you abandoned it.

[boppers]

28. Now we pump them with drugs, send millions of volts through their bodies, poison them to death...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States

Sooo progressive of us to abandon state sanctioned murder in the 18th-19th century, and murder people in a much more state sanctioned, civilized, way.

Uhm, what?

[burnsei sensei]

32. If you look at "The West" generally, you will find that

the majority of nations have abandoned the death penalty.
They abandoned it because not because they were progressive in themselves.
They abandoned it because it was accomplishing nothing and probably encouraging murder.
Which, I think, it does.
I think it gives people the idea that death is somehow a solution to problems.
You are very narrow in your view of the West as the U.S.
We were talking about Medieval Europe, the West.
And then, you narrowed the scope of the discussion to validate your claim.
Not very sharp.

[boppers]

36. I live in a country bigger than all of the EU, but still kills people.

While I'm happy that the EU is waking up, the US is a tad bigger.

[burnsei sensei]

41. We were not talking about the number of people

affected.
Population is as irrelevant as confining the discussion to the US.
We were talking about conservatism and progression in culture and what characterizes these two things.
You are grasping at straws, and the straws you are grasping at will be burning and downtrodden within the next century.
We don't have a society and culture trapped in a circular or static view of time.
We believe in linear time, and so change is possible.
What happened before will never happen again-- history does not repeat itself.
That is orthodox historical logic, not a polemic.
Your position, however, is quite polemical. You believe that all societies and cultures are the same. They are not.

[boppers]

42. Societies that kill is the topic.

The West is still guilty, as is the East.

I do not believe they are the same, but I cannot ignore the similarities.

[happyslug]

26. Trial by Ordeal, Trial by Dunking etc, had a 90% acquittal rate

The reason both were attacked starting in the 1500s was to many people were NOT being punished i.e. They took the Ordeal and were acquitted. With the raise of the Middle Class, roughly 10% of the population below the 3% Noble and Royal Class and the 87% peasants, leaving people go became unthinkable and thus Trial by Ordeal and its related Test of Trial by Dunking were attacked as "Primitive" and abolished in favor of a system where the peasants had a much less chance of winning.

The actual Trail by Ordeal and dunking (through this is less true of the related concept of Trial by Combat) tended to find the person going through the Ordeal of dunking NOT guilty. Most wounds only fester after three days, and thus the test was fester BEFORE three days. In Dunking, most people will be "received by the water" and thus found NOT Guilty. Thus at the Salem Witch Trials no dunkings occurred, all of the accused would have walked, thus they were tried in a court of Law and tortured till their confessed or died (All of those who confessed to being a witch walked, it was the people who did NOT Confess who were executed).

It appears that both types of Trials, Ordeal and Dunking, were encouraged by the Catholic Church for it permitted less execution then a trial in a court of the same time period. The Church's position was the accused was proved innocent OR God had forgiven the accused and thus could NOT be punished by man. The broke down when Northern Europe turned Protestant, thus the large scale witch trials were restricted to Protestant regions of Europe (The Catholics had the Inquest ion, I once joked about that fact i.e. The Catholic did NOT need to have witch Trials they had the Spanish Inquest ion, then I thought about it, the decision of the Inquest ion was always based on known fact NOT "Spiritual Evidence" used in Witch Trails, while neither system, Witch Trails and the Inquest ion, were meet today's requirements, the Inquest ion would come a lot closer then the Witch Trails).

Anyway, just pointing out that the Trail by Ordeal tended to help poor and non-popular people then the system that replaced it, the trial system of the late 1600s, the 1700s till about the early 1800s when more modern concepts of law and punishment were introduced.

[gophates]

31. Amen.

There is really no difference between the Xians here and the fundamentalists there, except that our laws don't currently allow that. If it did, you'd see all kinds of religion-based murder. It's what they do. Hypocrites, all of them.

[Gman]

14. Sounds like something Sharon Angle would support

[burnsei sensei]

18. I'd rather ask Sharon about that than assume

what she thinks.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[slackmaster]

19. The "Culture of Peace" really knows how to treat women

:nuke:

[TK421]

23. Seems to me animals are treated much better than women there

maybe these motherfuckers would like to be tied and lashed a couple hundred times...then we will hear the screaming of "little girls" from these manly-men...pieces of fucking shit

[Name removed]

24. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[leftynyc]

30. Sickening

For showing her face. Some cultures really are beneath contempt.

[murdoch]

34. This story is a complete fabrication and propaganda

This woman and her lover conspired to murder her husband. Why is there absolutely no mention of her murdered husband in any of these stories?

I have been following this story closely and virtually everything said regarding her is a complete fabrication.

"...the woman was wrongly identified as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had previously been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery."

Why does CNN not see fit to discuss Ashtiani's murdered husband, murdered by the lover she's charged with adultery with? You'd think she was just being executed for screwing some guy...

This reminds me when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech and suddenly there were headlines everywhere that he said Israel should be wiped off the map. A few people re-translated the speech and discovered he had never said that. I still hear talking heads tell the lie that he said that.

The lying and fabrications about Iran have taken on incredible levels. If you want to be astounded by how successful a propaganda campaign can be in the corporate media, and elsewhere (such as here on DU, where the campaign continues), go out of your way and actually research this story, read about how the adultery charge is with the lover who murdered her husband. Then see how many petitions, news stories, editorials completely fail to mention this, in a propaganda campaign to make people think she is being executed purely for adultery.

And if you care about the death penalty - the US has no diplomatic relations with Iran, a government whose secular, democratic government the USA overthrew in the 1950s when they wanted to nationalize their oil. Texas executed 16 people this year, which a lot more can be done about. As this has anything to do about this woman - this is all about prepping the USA for Israel's threatened bombings of Iran.

[happyslug]

35. So her real crime is Petty Treason?

Petty Treason was a English Common Law Crime where a wife (or a Servant) killed her husband (or Master/Superior). For more details see the following, but it contains an error. Petty Treason was NOT a Felony, it was Treason. Under the Common Law the difference was if someone was convicted of a Felony (Such as Murder) the King received use of his property for one year and then it went to his "Mesne Lord", i.e. the Person in charge of that part of England. On the other hand if you did Treason, your property was permanently forfeited to the King. In most of England the Mesne Lord and the King were one and the same, so it did NOT matter whether a wife was charged with Murder or Petty Treason. In either case the King got the land. In those areas where the King was NOT the Mesne Lord, then the King preferred to bring a Petty Treason charge instead of the Murder Charge.

The last case I read of in regards to Petty Treason was in an area where the Mesne Lord was NOT the King. It was a 1713 Case in Massachusetts. Massachusetts was a Royal Colony at that point, but it was a self-governing Royal Colony and as such was the "Mesne Lord" for itself. The Governor was appointed by the King and thus represented the King in Massachusetts. When a rich wife killed her husband, the Governor saw an chance to increase his wealth. He had her charge with Petty Treason so that her property would revert to the King and thus to him as the King's representative instead of the Colonial Assembly. She was convicted and hanged and the Governor received her property and the Colonial Assembly received nothing.

Double Checking my facts I ran across a 1725 Petty Treason case, cited below. It was a London case so why it was tried as Petty Treason is unknown to me (She had no money for the King to confiscate). I believe the above Massachusetts of 12 years earlier had reminded people of the crime and in the 1725 case the Killer was just out of luck (i.e. someone wanted to "follow" the law and burn her at the stake, the above Massachusetts case the Killer was simply hanged).

Such forfeiture was abolished in most cases in the 1800s, but lead to a particular aspect of the Common Law. If a person killed his parents, under the Common Law he inheritance from them. This sounds wrong to us and in most states (if not all states) this has been changed, but under the Common Law it made perfect sense. If the person who killed his parents was found guilty of murder, upon his conviction the property he inherited went to the State. With the abolishment of such forfeiture the Convicted person still received the inheritance but it was no longer forfeited to the state until such times as the state forbade such inheritance. In a recent case out of California shows the weakness of this resolution. The Sons killed their parents for the money. Under California law the money could NOT go to them so it went to their aunt, the nearest relative to the parents who had been killed. The Aunt then turned the money over to the sons who had murdered their parents (It went for legal costs). Think about it, given that type of Situation would it NOT be better to have the Common Law Rule instead? i.e. Forfeit the inheritance to the state? A side issue in a case like this but an issue when it comes to people who kill close relatives.

Petty Treason:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_treason

1725 Burning at the Stake for Petty Treason:
http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/hayes.html

Mesne Lord:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesne_lord

From a 1927 book:
http://books.google.com/books?id=NscKQr-aqNIC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=mesne+lord&source=bl&ots=hgjC0DkdIL&sig=Qp0AHSsqZxOeehSbOEH0xDAplm0&hl=en&ei=W7uFTOH0EoaKlwfEqqX6Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=mesne%20lord&f=false

[Prometheus Bound]

37. Thank goodness not everyone is taken in by the propaganda.

It starts to feel a bit like 1984 sometimes.

This 99 lashes is hearsay. One of her lawyers reports a woman who was allegedly in prison with her allegedly saying that Ashtiani allegedly said she was allegedly given another 99 lashes.

Her son hasn't talked to her for a month, but says she "may" have received the lashes.

Her other lawyer says she didn't receive said lashes, according to the NY Times.

But it makes for a good hate fest.

[LostinVA]

39. It has been discussed extensively here and in the media

I have seen no actual proof that says she did it, nor have Iranian courts.

[Prometheus Bound]

40. The issue appears to be whether she was tortured, not that she confessed to involvement.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani 'confesses' to involvement in murder on Iran state TV

The Iranian woman whose sentence to death by stoning sparked an international outcry is feared to be facing imminent execution, after she was put on a state-run TV programme last night where she confessed to adultery and involvement in a murder.

Speaking shakily in her native Azeri language, which could be heard through a voiceover, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani told an interviewer that she was an accomplice to the murder of her husband and that she had an extramarital relationship with her husband's cousin. Her lawyer told the Guardian last night that his client, a 43-year-old mother of two, was tortured for two days before the interview was recorded in Tabriz prison, where she has been held for the past four years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/12/sakineh-mohammadi-ashtiani-confesses-murder-iran

[rabs]

43. Brazil's president Lula da Silva trying to save the woman

Iran today delayed the stoning and the death sentence is being reviewed.

Story from Semana magazine of Bogota Colombia:


"La sentencia contra Ashtiani por adulterio ha sido paralizada y su caso está siendo revisado otra vez, mientras que su sentencia en relación a su complicidad con el asesinato sigue en curso", dijo el portavoz ministerial a la cadena iraní PressTv.

--"The sentence against Ashtiani for adultery has been halted and her case is being reviewed once again, while the sentence in relation to her complicity in the murder (of her husband) is moving forward." (Iranian Foreign Minister Ramin Mehmanparas

----------------

From story today in O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper in Brazil

Lula influenciou decisão de suspender execução de iraniana, diz Amorim

--Lula influenced decision to suspend execution of Iranian, Amorim says.

O ministro das Relações Exteriores, Celso Amorim, disse nesta quarta-feira que as "gestões" do presidente Luiz Inácio da Silva em contato com o governo do Irã tiveram "peso" na suspensão da sentença de apedrejamento de Sakineh Ashtiani.

-- Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said Wednesday that the "overtures" of President da Silva with the government of Iran carried "weight" in the suspension of the stoning sentence against Sakineh Ashtiani.

"Não podemos atribuir só a nós, mas certamente as gestões do presidente Lula terão tido um peso, como creio que já tiveram até agora, inclusive no que já aconteceu até hoje", disse o chanceler, em Brasília.

-- "We cannot full credit, but certainly the overtures of President Lula had to have had weight, as I believe it has had until now, including what happened up to today," the foreign minister said in Brasilia.

O Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Irã anunciou nesta quarta-feira que a sentença de morte por apedrejamento contra Sakineh Ashtiani foi suspensa, embora seu caso continue sendo analisado e ela ainda possa ser executada.

--The Foreign Minister of Iran announced Wednesday that the death sentence by stoning against Sakineh Ashtiani had been suspended, although her case continues to be analyzed and she could still be executed.

------------------------

If anyone can save this woman from being executed, guess it will be Brasilia, which has good diplomatic relations with Tehran. Brazil earlier this week offered her political asylum.

(Spanish, Portuguese translations mine.)

Edit - typo