2/13/2011
When you think of death penalty here in the United States, you think of legal injection but in Iran their death penalty is being stoned to death in front of a large crowd. A legal injection is supposed to be a painless death. I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be stoned. Being buried in the ground with only your head being exposed and having people throwing stones at your head sounds unethical and inhuman. In this blog, there was a woman whose death sentence was reprieved thanks to the help of human rights groups and activists but even though she was saved there were still twelve women and three men who were still awaiting their death penalty. All twelve of the women and one of the men were convicted of adultery. In the United States, if you were to cheat on your spouse then at most you would probably have to pay some money to them during your divorce if you decide to go that way. In Iran, being stoned is presumable apart of their culture. Crime committed or not, the person accused name is now out there that they did something and now their family feels that they have lost their honor and the only way to get it back is death. One woman named Shammameh Ghorbani was awaiting her death sentence and she had begged not to be freed from prison because she feared being killed by her family. Either way she faced was death. It was said that Iranian parliament had passed a law banning people being stoned but there was silence on the issue by the Guardian Council. Many women are kept in prison because the government doesn’t want public attention. They don’t want to seem barbaric to the world and William Hague, a foreign secretary, quoted “a medieval punishment has no place in the modern world”, which would make sense as to why Iran wouldn’t want this to get out that people were getting stoned. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires that have not yet abolished the death penalty but to restrict its use to more serious crimes. I believe that this is a small stepping stone but they should just get rid of being stoned to death all together.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/08/iran-death-stoning-adultery
2 comments:
I had no clue stoning was even around anymore. With all the new ways to kill someone you'd figure that the old ways were done with. I mean, the fact that adultery is considered a "crime" is bad enough but yeah it could be a culture thing. But come on, stoning?
It does seem so barbaric to use such a crude method to inflict the death penalty, but wrong as it is, it is not used just as punishment it is used as a fear tactic. I find it very interesting the number of men to women in prison awaiting this punishment. It is so sad that these women will be executed by the government or by their families. They do not stand a chance.
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