Iran | Executions Leapt 25 Percent in Raisi's First Year but Twice as Many Took Place in Secret, Report Finds

Use of the death penalty in Iran shot up by 25 per cent in the last year ex-chief justice Ebrahim Raisi became president, an annual survey has found.

At least 333 people were executed in Iran in 2021 compared to 267 in 2020, and 280 the year before the pandemic.

The annual report on the death penalty in Iran, published by Iran Human Rights and Together Against the Death Penalty, also found at least 17 of the condemned were women, and two people were hanged for crimes committed when they were children.

Iran also remained the world’s top executioner last year. “In Iran,” Iran Human Rights director Mahmoud Amiry-Moghaddam said, “we do not have due process. We do not have the independent judiciary. There is systematic use of torture to force confessions.

“In almost all death penalty cases, sentences are issued based on confessions extracted from the prisoner. Basically, the judiciary can sentence anyone to death on any charges if they wish.

“The Islamic Republic’s dreadful human rights and death penalty records are not included in the JCPOA talks, and it seems that the Iranian authorities are under less scrutiny while the negotiations are ongoing.”

At least 126 of the recorded executions, close to 40 percent, were for drug-related charges and 183 were for murder. As in previous years, the Iranian judiciary sentenced a disproportionate number of people from ethnic minority groups to death.

The majority of prisoners executed for security-related charges were ethnic Arabs, Baluchis and Kurds. Baluch prisoners accounted for 21% of all those hanged though they only represent two to six percent of Iran’s population.

ECPM director Raphael Chenuil-Hazan said: “We are alarmed at the disproportionate number of ethnic minority executions as evidenced in this report. This issue has been raised by human rights NGOs, the United Nations Special Rapporteur and the European Parliament, but it still requires more attention by the international community.”

This year some 83.5 percent of the killings were not announced in any way by the authorities. Also in 2021, the parliament passed draft legislation that would allow citizen journalists who report on the death penalty to themselves be sentenced to death.

Concurrently, the report noted, at least 126 people had been put to death in Iranian prisons with little to no reaction from either the European Parliament or the UN.

Some of the deaths occurred in circumstances that will have compounded the trauma to convicts’ families.

Arman Abdolali, one of the juvenile offenders, was taken to the gallows seven times in the months prior to his execution.

Zahra Esmaili had a fatal heart attack as she watched several men being executed in front of her. Prison guards still hanged her lifeless body.

Executions in Iran reached their peak in 2015, with 972 executions recorded that year before the trend began to drop. The number has now increased slightly again in an atmosphere of heightened secrecy; in the last five years an average of 34 percent of all executions were reported in the Iranian media. This year, the proportion stood at 16.5 percent.

In a survey conducted for Iran Human Rights and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, some 79 percent of Iranians said they would not choose qisas (the death penalty as retribution) if an immediate family member was murdered. In 2021, there were at least 705 cases of forgiveness rather than see another citizen hang.

Source: iranwire.com, Staff, April 28, 2022

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

South Carolina | Inmate who believes he’s died repeatedly can’t be executed, judge rules

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Idaho eyes restart of death row executions as firing squad draws near

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20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

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South Dakota | Latest appeal from state's lone death row inmate denied

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Iran to execute first woman linked to mass protests after ‘forced confessions’

Bita Hemmati and three others have been sentenced to death for 'collusion' and 'propaganda.' Advocates claim the charges are baseless, citing a secretive process and state-televised interrogations. Iranian authorities are preparing to execute Bita Hemmati, the first woman sentenced to death in connection with the mass protests in Tehran in late December and January, according to the US-based non-profit the Human Rights Activists News Agency. Judge Iman Afshari, of Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, sentenced Hemmati, her husband, Mohammadreza Majidi Asl, and Behrouz Zamaninezhad, and Kourosh Zamaninezhad to death on the charge of “operational action for the hostile government of the United States and hostile groups,” in addition to discretionary imprisonment period of five years on the charge of “assembly and collusion against national security.”

Texas | James Broadnax's appeals: US Supreme Court denies 2 claims, confession pending

Despite an 11th-hour confession from another man, James Broadnax is slated to be executed by the state of Texas later this week. Broadnax, 37, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection April 30 in Huntsville. He was condemned by a Dallas County jury in 2009 for the deaths of Stephen Swan, 26, and Matthew Butler, 28, outside their Garland music studio. Broadnax and his cousin, Demarius Cummings, had set out to rob the men, but left with only $2 and a 1995 Ford, according to previous reporting from The Dallas Morning News.

Florida executes Chadwick Scott Willacy

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Arizona | Man who murdered pastor crucifixion style requests plea deal after parents killed in plane crash

Adam Sheafe, the California man who admitted to killing a New River, Arizona, pastor in a crucifixion-style attack, has asked prosecutors to offer him a plea deal that would result in a natural life sentence rather than the death penalty he had previously sought. Advisory council attorneys representing Sheafe sent a formal plea offer to prosecutors this week, about two weeks after his father and stepmother died in a plane crash at Marana Airport on April 8, according to 12 News. Sheafe, 51, is charged with first-degree murder in the death of William Schonemann, 76, pastor of New River Bible Church, who was found dead inside his home last April.

Florida executes James Ernest Hitchcock

STARKE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida man convicted of beating and choking his brother’s 13-year-old stepdaughter to death nearly 50 years ago was executed Thursday evening. James Ernest Hitchcock, 70, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was convicted of the July 1976 killing of Cynthia Driggers. The curtain to the death chamber opened promptly at the 6 p.m. execution time. Hitchcock’s entire body was covered in a sheet up to his head. He stared at the ceiling as the team warden made a call, then gave his final statement.

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