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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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Iran regime carries out two public executions

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Public hanging of Hamid B. in Shiraz on May 26, 2016
Public hanging of Hamid B. in Shiraz on May 26, 2016
NCRI – Iran’s fundamentalist regime has publicly hanged two men in Fars Province, southern Iran, and Mazandaran Province, northern Iran, in the past 24 hours.

On Monday, May 30, an unnamed 40-year-old prisoner, was hanged in public in the town of Noor in Mazandaran, according to the state-run Young Journalists Club (YJC) news agency which quoted the regime's prosecutor in Noor, Qanbar Qanbari.

On Sunday, May 29, a man identified only by his surname Zohrabi, was hanged in public in the town of Kovar, 40 kilometers south of Shiraz, the provincial capital in Fars.

The mullahs' regime last Thursday publicly hanged a man, identified only as Hamid B., in the southern city of Shiraz.

The latest hangings bring to at least 118 the number of people executed in Iran since April 10. Three of those executed were women and two are believed to have been juvenile offenders.

Ms. Farideh Karimi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and a human rights activist, last week called for an urgent response by the United Nations and foreign governments to the recent spate of executions and the appalling state of human rights in Iran.

Iran's fundamentalist regime earlier this month amputated the fingers of a man in his thirties in Mashhad, the latest in a line of draconian punishments handed down and carried out in recent weeks.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said in a statement on April 13 that the increasing trend of executions “aimed at intensifying the climate of terror to rein in expanding protests by various strata of the society, especially at a time of visits by high-ranking European officials, demonstrates that the claim of moderation is nothing but an illusion for this medieval regime.”

Amnesty International in its April 6 annual Death Penalty report covering the 2015 period wrote: "Iran put at least 977 people to death in 2015, compared to at least 743 the year before."

"Iran alone accounted for 82% of all executions recorded" in the Middle East and North Africa, the human rights group said.

There have been more than 2,300 executions during Hassan Rouhani’s tenure as President. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran in March announced that the number of executions in Iran in 2015 was greater than any year in the last 25 years. Rouhani has explicitly endorsed the executions as examples of “God’s commandments” and “laws of the parliament that belong to the people.

Source: NCRI, May 30, 2016

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