Iran: Four Women Stoned To Death

Varying reports are surfacing that four Iranian women have been stoned to death.

Read More Here -: MFS - The Other News:

Based on reports received by the Melli-Mazhabi  (Religious-Nationalist) website (English translation can be read here), security agents from the Iranian Judiciary transferred the bodies of four women who had been stoned to death to the Tehran forensic medicine department. The bodies are currently in freezers at this department.

The stoning executions occurred two days after the Chair of Judicial and Legal Committee of the Iranian Parliament announced that the act of stoning had been replaced by alternative forms of punishment. According to Allahyar Malekshahi, conditions of adultery, the burden of proof, and the punishment for the offence were discussed in the Committee. According to Mr. Malekshahi, “In Iran’s [Islamic Penal] Code, adultery is punishable by death, but conditions on how to prove the act of adultery has taken place are not mentioned. In order to clarify the law, a separate section was added to distinguish the conditions under which a relationship is qualified as adultery.

See also: Iran Human Rights

Warning: the above links contain images many will find distressing.

Execution of Mary Dyer

From The Examiner:

On this day, June 1, in 1660, American colonist Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston for violating Massachusetts Bay Colony law by preaching Quakerism.

Dyer was among a short list of outspoken women in the colony's earliest years. Before she became a Quaker, she and Anne Hutchinson were banished for preaching that God spoke directly to individuals rather than through the clergy.

Dyer, Hutchinson and their husbands started the colony of Rhode Island after being kicked out of Massachusetts in 1638.

In 1657, she returned to Massachusetts as a Quaker preacher and began spreading her gospel across New England. Dyer was repeatedly arrested and banished.

On May 31, 1660, she was convicted of defying the anti-Quaker law and was hanged the next day.

Film - The Conspirator

From Gateway:

"The Conspirator" is the story of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), the only woman charged as a co-conspirator in the killing of President Lincoln, and the mother of John Surratt, one of the eight conspirators that included John Wilkes Booth. The 28-year-old Fredrick Aiken is a Union solider who recently returned from the war and is just beginning to practice law. His mentor, Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) asks him to take the case. He is reluctant at first but soon begins to see the injustices in Surratt's military tribunal.

This movie isn't just about the execution of Surratt. Though it plays like a legal thriller, you never get that David and Goliath feel. History has told us how this story ends, and it's fairly clear from almost the first courtroom scene that Aiken has no chance of winning.

Edith Cavell by Diane Souhami

Review in the Financial Times:

The British nurse Edith Cavell worked as part of a Belgian resistance network during the first world war, operating from the training school she had been recruited to set up in Brussels in 1907. The Germans had turned her school into a Red Cross hospital, where she and her nurses treated German soldiers as well as French, Belgian and British. Cavell was asked to help injured British soldiers by resistance leaders who were members of the Belgian aristocracy. She hid soldiers in the hospital, and provided false papers, guides and safe houses en route to Holland.

The school, however, came under increasing scrutiny and suspicion until Cavell and several of her colleagues were arrested. She was tricked into making a false confession; a hasty trial followed, conducted in German, culminating in the death sentence. A series of diplomatic blunders and a lethargic response on the part of the US ambassador in Brussels were insufficient to divert proceedings and Cavell, along with her colleague Philippe Baucq, were executed at dawn on October 12 1915 at the national rifle range outside Brussels.

USA: Teresa Lewis To Be Executed

From AOL News:

Barring intervention from the governor or Supreme Court, the state of Virginia plans to execute a woman later this month for the first time in nearly a century.

Teresa Lewis, a 41-year-old grandmother with such a low IQ that she's classified as borderline mentally retarded, is set to die by lethal injection on Sept. 23. She'll be the state's first female prisoner put to death in 98 years.

The two triggermen, one of whom Teresa Lewis was having an affair, got life in prison. But a judge deemed Lewis the crime's mastermind and called her "the head of this serpent," and sentenced her to death, according to Time Magazine.

If Lewis' sentence is carried out, it would be the 12th execution of a woman in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Fight to Save Sakineh

From Associated Press:

About 300 people from rights organizations have demonstrated in Paris to urge Iran to lift its death sentence on an Iranian woman convicted of adultery.

The protesters carried banners reading "Let's Save Sakineh," in honor of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two who has been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.

After international protests, Iran lifted the stoning sentence last month, but she could still face execution by hanging.

Iran-born women's rights activist Anna Pak told Saturday's Paris crowd that Iran must "stop killing men and women" after alleged forced confessions.

Sihem Habchi, of a noted French group representing downtrodden minority women, said Ashtiani symbolizes the "right to be a woman."

NK Executes Christian Woman

From Fox News:

North Korea publicly executed a Christian woman last month for distributing the Bible, which is banned in the communist nation, South Korean activists said Friday.

Ri Hyon Ok, 33, was also accused of spying for South Korea and the United States and organizing dissidents. She was executed in the northwestern city of Ryongchon near the border with China on June 16, according to a report from an alliance of several dozen anti-North Korea groups.

Ri's parents, husband and three children were sent to a political prison camp in the northeastern city of Hoeryong the following day, the report said, citing unidentified documents it says were obtained from North Korea. It showed a copy of Ri's North Korean government-issued photo ID. It is virtually impossible to verify such reports about secretive North Korea, where the government tightly controls the lives of its citizens and does not allow dissent.

On Thursday, an annual report from a state-run South Korean think tank on human rights in the North said that public executions, though dropping in number in recent years, were still carried out for crimes ranging from murder to circulating foreign movies.

North Korea claims to guarantee freedom of religion for its 24 million people but in reality severely restricts religious observances. The cult of personality surrounding national founder Kim Il Sung and his son, current leader Kim Jong Il, is a virtual state religion.

The government has authorized four state churches, one Catholic, two Protestant and one Russian Orthodox, but they cater to foreigners and ordinary North Koreans cannot attend. However, defectors and activists say more than 30,000 North Koreans are believed to practice Christianity secretly.

The U.S. State Department reported last year that "genuine religious freedom does not exist" in North Korea.

"North Korea appears to have judged that Christian forces could pose a threat to its regime," Do Hee-youn, a leading activist, told reporters, claiming public executions, arrest and detention of North Koreans are prevalent.

Mary Hanson

--- a tale by Arthur L Hayward

Amongst the many frailties to which our nature is subject, there is not perhaps a more dangerous one than the indulging ourselves in ridiculous and provoking discourses, merely to try the tempers of other people. I speak not this with regard to the criminal of whom we are next to treat, but of the person who in the midst of his sins drew upon himself a sudden and violent death by using such silly kind of speeches towards a woman weak in her nature, and deprived of what little reason she had by drink.

This poor creature, flying into an excess of passion with Francis Peters, who was some distant relation to her by marriage, she wounded him suddenly under the right pap with a knife, before she could be prevented by any of the company; of which wound he died. The warm expressions she had been guilty of before the blow, prevailed with the jury to think she had a premeditated malice, and thereupon they found her guilty.

Fear of death, want of necessaries, and a natural tenderness of body, brought on her soon after conviction so great a sickness that she could not attend the duties of public devotion, and reduced her to the necessity of catching the little intervals of ease which her distemper allowed her, to beg pardon of God for that terrible crime for which she had been guilty.

There was at the same time, one Mary Stevens in the condemned hold (though she afterwards received a reprieve) who was very instrumental in bringing this poor creature to a true sense of herself and of her sins; she then confessed the murder with all its circumstances, reproached herself with having been guilty of such a crime as to murder the person who had so carefully took her under his roof, allowed her a subsistence and been so peculiarly civil to her, for which he expected no return but what was easily in her power to make. This Mary Stevens was a weak-brained woman, full of scruples and difficulties, and almost distracted at the thoughts of having committed several robberies. After receiving the Sacrament, she not only persuaded this Mary Hanson to behave herself as became a woman under her unhappy condition, but also persuaded two or three other female criminals in that place to make the best use of that mercy which the leniency of the Government has extended them.

There was a man suffered to go twice a day to read to them, and probably it was he who drew up the paper for Mary Hanson which she left behind her, for though it be very agreeable to the nature of her case, yet it is penned in the manner not likely to come from the hands of a poor ignorant woman. Certain it is, however, that she behaved herself with great calmness and resolution at the time of her death, and did not appear at all disturbed at that hurry which, as I shall mention in the next life, happened at the place of execution. The paper she left ran in these words, viz.:

Though the poverty of my parents hindered me from having any great education, yet I resolve to do as I know others in my unhappy circumstances have done, and by informing the world of the causes which led me to that crime for which I so justly suffer, that by shunning it they may avoid such a shameful end; and I particularly desire all women to take heed how they give way to drunkenness, which is a vice but too common in this age. It was that disorder in which my spirits were, occasioned by the liquor I had drunk, which hurried me to the committing a crime, at the thoughts of which on any other time my blood would have curdled. I hope you will afford me your prayers for my departing soul, as I offer up mine to God that none of you may follow me to this fatal place.

Having delivered this paper, she suffered at about thirty years old.

Antonio Foscarini

For those interested in politics and intrigue in Medieval / Renaissance Venice, drop by my good friend Jason's "Executed Today" website and have a read of "The Execution of Antonio Foscarini".

A tale of jealously, political intrigue, a foreign woman, a secret execution!


I really love this site!

Executed Today - Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland was executed today, 8th February 1587.

My good friend, Jason, of Executed Today, has kindly permitted me to post a little blurb on Mary on his site. You can view the article here: Mary Queen of Scots.

What is "Executed Today" - well, its a rather interesting look at history through the executions of the famous and infamous. Jason presents a calendar of executions - a bit like 'this day in history".

A unique look at history - and a unique site, which if you haven't already dropped by you should, in the words of a famous Australian, "do yourself a favour" and take a peek.

Enjoy!