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As clock ticks toward another Trump presidency, federal death row prisoners appeal for clemency

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President-elect Donald Trump’s return to office is putting a spotlight on the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, which houses federal death row. In Bloomington, a small community of death row spiritual advisors is struggling to support the prisoners to whom they minister.  Ross Martinie Eiler is a Mennonite, Episcopal lay minister and member of the Catholic Worker movement, which assists the homeless. And for the past three years, he’s served as a spiritual advisor for a man on federal death row.

Iran executes Jewish man for fatal stabbing

Arvin Netanel Ghahremani's relatives claim he did not receive adequate defense.

Authorities in Iran on Monday executed a Jewish man, Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, who had been sentenced to death for murder, Iranian media reported.

“The sentence of retribution was executed this morning,” said Hamidreza Karimi, the prosecutor for Kermanshah in western Iran, according to the Mehr news agency.

According to one version of events, in November 2022, seven men, including Amir Shokri, a non-Jewish man who owed money to Ghahremani, then 18, ambushed him at a gym. Shokri pulled a knife on Ghahremani and an altercation ensued, resulting in Shokri’s death.

Karimi offered a different account. He told Mehr that, “According to the eyewitness, no one else was present at the scene of the murder except for Arvin Ghahremani and the victim.”

Under Iranian law, relatives of murder victims may choose to accept a cash settlement and spare the killer’s life. Shokri’s family declined the cash offer and insisted on the sentence being carried out, Mehr reported.

Ghahremani’s family had said during his trial that “key errors in the case were intentionally ignored” and that his actions to save the victim were not taken into account, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).

The man’s relatives also said that Ghahremani was not adequately represented by his defense lawyer.

Ghahremani’s execution had been set for May, but he received a last-minute stay of execution.

The Islamic Republic executed 853 people in 2023—the most since 2015, London-based Amnesty International said last month.

Earlier this year, Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, expressed concerns that Ghahremani was not receiving a fair trial because he was Jewish.

“We note with concern that Iranian authorities often subject Jewish citizens to different standards when it comes to determining judgments in cases of this nature,” she said.

Source: JNS, Staff, November 4, 2024

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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



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