[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 2



IRAN:

http://www.iranhrdc.org/english/publications/human-rights-data/chart-of-executions/1000000620-ihrdc-chart-of-executions-by-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-2016.html

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The Execution Of 12 Prisoners In Rajai Shahr Prison Postponed For The 2nd Time


For the 2nd time in 2 weeks, the execution of 12 prisoners of Rajai Shahr 
Prison was halted, and the prisoners were sent from solitary confinement back 
to the ward.

According to the report of Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), these 
prisoners, who have been charged with murder and sentenced to death 
(retaliation in kind), were transferred to solitary confinement for the 
implementation of the sentences.

This group of 12 prisoners had been transferred to solitary confinement 
previously on the 13th of January, but were taken back as the executions were 
postponed.

Hossein Moini, Naser Karim-Nejhad, Mehdi Kahe, Reza Teymouri, Javad Sadeghi, 
Ebad Mohammadi, Mostafa Ejlali, Sajjad Nemati, Javad Mozafari, Mohammadreza 
Abbasi and an inmate with the 1st name Anoush, are among the announced 
prisoners who were sent to solitary confinements.

The authorities and judiciary organs have not announced anything about the 
dossiers and the reason for the repeated dispatch of these prisoners to the 
solitary confinements.

(source: Human Rights Activists News Agency)






JAPAN----film

Criterion Tackles the Death Penalty with Nagisa Oshima's DEATH BY HANGING


The Criterion Collection has been good to Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima. 
His celebrated, explicit-sex shocker In The Realm of the Senses (along with its 
sorta-sequel, Empire of Passion) have seen disc from the company, and Criterion 
has also released a shotgun blast of his 1960s films via their lower-fi Eclipse 
series.

Now Oshima's 1968 film, Death By Hanging, joins the collection as spine #798. 
It's not a title I was familiar with prior to now, but I had a great time 
familiarizing myself with it in this format, and am surprised there isn't more 
conversation about this film and its seemingly inexhaustible formal daring. (As 
the liner notes themselves point out: with Death By Hanging alongside 2001, 
If..., Once Upon a Time in the West and Rosemary's Baby among others, 1968 was 
one hell of a year for filmmaking, wasn't it?)

Shot in high-contrast black and white almost entirely in a single, deceptively 
elaborate set, Death By Hanging pops off the screen on Criterion's blu-ray, as 
Oshima charts a strange, spiral-shaped course through his story.

The setup is nicely high concept. Tasked with executing a convicted criminal 
named R, a group of prison officials go about their grisly business right up 
until the moment when R sort of, uh, fails to die. "R'S BODY REFUSES TO BE 
EXECUTED," the first of a series of cheekily metaphysical intertitles asserts.

This kicks off an all-points legal quandary, as the prison officials, lawyers, 
magistrates and witnesses attempt to determine the precise logistics around 
re-executing someone who has, technically, already been executed. The scenario 
opens up an odd theological point as well, as the Catholic chaplain asserts 
that having already received last rites, R's soul has been forgiven and is on 
its way to heaven - and that from a certain point of view, therefore, R's body 
is exempt responsibility for the crimes for which R was being put to death in 
the first place.

As a point of satire, this would be more than enough to make a meal of, but 
Oshima has barely gotten started. The prison officials begin attempting to 
revive R's memory of the crimes he has committed (he has post-strangulation 
amnesia) through increasingly elaborate - and, by necessity, appalling - 
pantomime and role-play. We learn that R raped and murdered two women; and then 
watch in gruesome fascination as the other men (lead by an unhinged Education 
Chief) reenact the details of both rapes, first with reluctance, and then with 
greater and greater diabolical gusto.

As all this unfolds, we delve into a further layer: R is of Korean descent, a 
minority culture in Japan. The conversation becomes racially charged and 
inherently bigoted (instructed to "act more Korean," one of the players 
immediately mimes whipping out his penis and urinating all over the rest of the 
group). As the common consensus among the men begins to fracture, we watch this 
ad-hoc society strenuously attempt to maintain the institutional othering that 
people like R have had to face in Japanese society. Poverty and crime are 
linked, as are R's displacement from "proper" society" and his dissociative 
fantasies of achieving something like a normal life.

It's an uncommonly rich broth of ideas. By the third act, furthermore, the 
rules of what you or I would call "reality" have been firmly... well, if not 
thrown out altogether, at least thoroughly questioned.

The film clips along as questions of class, race, gender and citizenship double 
back on themselves over and over again. State-sanctioned murder - capital 
punishment and war - are consciously linked, monetized, and gendered.

It's an eerily relatable piece of filmmaking in 2016, revolving as it does 
around how wealth disparity and criminalization work together to enforce social 
rules, all set against a painfully contemporary question of immigration and 
assimilation whose argument has, sadly, only strengthened with time.

While Criterion's audio-visual presentation of Death By Hanging is excellent, I 
have to point out that the supplemental content is surprisingly thin this time 
around. The most interesting extra on the disc is a 25-minute documentary film 
by Oshima called Diary of Yunbogi, which also deals with the Korean immigration 
question, through 1st-person narration and a series of still photographs taken 
by the director himself.

There's also a half-hour interview with Asian cinema critic Tony Rayns, who 
does a good job of positioning Death By Hanging amidst the haphazard 
independent entries in the director's 1960s output. You'll be digging out your 
Eclipse box set of Oshima's Outlaw Sixties as soon as you put Death By Hanging 
on the shelf, to follow his inquiry into anti-Korean racism into Three 
Resurrected Drunkards and Sing a Song of Sex.

Additionally, at this point I think it's time to say farewell to the Criterion 
Collection's printed insert booklet. They seem to have moved permanently to 
single-page fold-outs, which still puts them ahead of every other DVD racket in 
the market, who have abandoned liner notes altogether; but still feels a bit 
cheap and awkward, even if you're only likely to read the essays once. 
Nonetheless, Howard Hampton's piece here - along with Oshima's own director's 
statement from 1968 - is well worth a look.

(source: twitchfilm.com)






BANGLADESH:

Bangladesh hands death penalty to 2 war criminals


A special tribunal court in Dhaka has sentenced two war crimes convicts to 
death over crimes against humanity during the Liberation War in 1971.

4 out of 6 charges pressed against Obaidul Haque Taher and Ataur Rahman Nani 
razakars of Netrakona, The Daily Star reported.

According to the 2 charges that earned Taher, 66, and Nani, 62, death penalty, 
they were accompanied by other razakars and the Pakistan army attacked Laufa 
village under Barhatta Police Station on October 19, 1971, and detained 10 
people.

7 of the detainees were later shot dead while one survived with bullet injuries 
and 2 were freed. The razakars also raped women there.

Between November 15 and 16, the duo along with other razakars detained 7 
people.

(source: Free Press Journal)