Sunday, May 03, 2009

DELARA DARABI SHAMEFUL EXECUTION

Delara Darabi, an artist/ painter allegedly stabbed a woman as a 17- year old minor in the northern Caspian Sea city of Rasht. Despite her recanting the torture acquired confession in court she was condemned to death but the execution was stayed till she reached an adult age.. Islamic iran's so called, Iraqi born, justice minister Hashemi Shahroudi ordered a stay of execution to allow Delara to obtain a "forgiveness" from the dead man's family. Which would then spare her from being killed. BUT... without the presence of her lawyer and her family, without the opportunity to address this .... she was suddenly yanked out of her prison cell, screaming on her cell phone to her mother for help and screaming they were about to execute her, ignoring the official stay. A jailer snatched away the phone and coldly informed her distraught mother that they were taking the now 23-year old woman to be hanged and there was nothing the mom could do about it. Then hanging up the phone before a final goodby could be exchanged. Reports reaching us from Iran state that Delara, who was regularly raped by her jailers and the presiding judicial Mullah judge, had become pregnant and was hurriedly executed to prevent this becoming apparent and this fact leaking out. Injustice # 1 Iran is state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Charter of the Rights of the Child which forbids the execution of those who have committed an offence before the age of 18. Delara was 17 years old when she was allegedly charged of murder. To the bitter end she maintained her innocence. Injustice #2 The initial verdict that was issued, was based on a confession from a child that did not know her rights, and was not made aware of the consequences for taking the blame for a crime she says she did not commit. And maintained to the very end. Injustice #3 Medical examination of Mahin’s body in an autopsy suggested that the crime was committed by a right-handed person. Delara was left handed. If a new trial was accorded to present this new evidence, the death penalty verdict could have been reversed. Delara’s lawyer Abdolsamad Khoramshahi has tried for years to obtain a new trial and carry out a re-enactment of the crime in court, with no success. He is also convinced that due to Delara’s small frame and gentle nature, it was an impossibility for her to have committed the offence. A partnering lawyer who followed the case, Mohammad Mostafaei, said “I swear she is innocent”. Injustice #4 Whereas the head of Judiciary Ayatollah Shahroudi accorded a 2 month stay of execution in order for the families to try and negotiate a pardon, Delara was executed in less than 10 days from this order. Injustice #5 Under Iran’s Penal Code it states that the family and lawyer of the accused are to be given 48 hours prior notice before execution. No such warning had been given. Instead Delara was executed in secret, like Reza Hejazi and Behnam Zare, with no mother, father or sister to be with her in her last frightening moments or to hear her final words. Injustice #6: In cases of “ghesas” crimes, the decision whether or not to execute the accused rests with the relatives of the victim. What kind of Justice system allows the biased opinion of the family who has lost a family member to decide ones fate? In the early days of the 1979 revolution, countless people were arrested, estimated at some 90,000 in a matter of weeks - in addition to thousands murdered in the streets and executed daily in the Mullah prisons. Among these were myriad women and very young girls dragged into prisons in mass family arrests, pending some form of triage to determine whether they should have been incarcerated in the first place. But consequently and without any recourse, becoming the unwilling sex toys and slaves of sadistic jailers commanded by clerics but consisting of mostly the 2,000 Palestinians brought in by Arafart, who abused them physically, in individual and mass gang rapes with many dying under the horrific sex acts they had to perform. Their dead bodies were thrown onto the corpses of those executed many times a day inside the prisons like Evin, with a bullet ot two pumped into them to conceal the true way the died. (Adding insult to injury, the families of the executed were forced to pay for the bullets used before receiving the dead bodies for burial!) One of the greatest fears in the women's section of prisons, as great as the actual physical abuse of multiple rape, was becoming pregnant at the hands of the rapists. The moment this happened, the female prisoners were promptly added to the daily execution list to hide their having been raped in the segregated and ostensibly secluded women only prisons. The haste to execute Delara was to also hide this very disclosure of her constant rapes and pregnancy at the hands of the Mullahs. THE WORST OF ALL THIS IS THAT OBA-HUSSEIN WANTS TO PLAY FOOTSIE AND MAKE NICE WITH THE MULLAHS!

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