[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

August 27




IRAN----female execution

94th woman executed in Iran under Rouhani



On Sunday morning, August 25, 2019, a woman was executed in Mashhad Central 
Prison. This is the 94th woman executed during 6 years of Hassan Rouhani’s 
presidency.

The Iranian regime has executed at least 4 women in July, alone. Including 
Maliheh Salehian from Miandoab who was hanged on July 16, 2019, on charges of 
murder in the central prison of Mahabad.

On July 17, 2019, another female prisoner, Zahra Safari Moghadam, 43, was 
hanged in the Prison of Nowshahr, in northern Iran.

2 women identified as Arasteh Ranjbar and Nazdar Vatankhah who had already 
spent 15 years in prison on the charge of murder and complicity in murder, were 
hanged at the Central Prison of Urmia at dawn on Tuesday, July 23, 2019.

More than 3,700 people have been executed in Iran in the past six years under 
Rouhani’s presidency. The woman executed in Mashhad Central Prison is the 94th 
victim of the clerical regime’s death penalties.

The Iranian regime is the world’s top record holder of per capita executions. 
It deploys the death penalty as a tool for maintaining its grab on power and 
for silencing a disgruntled populace the majority of whom live under the 
poverty line, while unemployment is rampant in the country and there is no 
freedom of speech.

Rule 61 of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and 
Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules) reads, “When 
sentencing women offenders, courts shall have the power to consider mitigating 
factors such as lack of criminal history and relative non-severity and nature 
of the criminal conduct, in the light of women’s caretaking responsibilities 
and typical backgrounds.”

The Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran condemns 
the execution of the 94th woman hanged Sunday morning by the mullahs’ regime in 
Mashhad since she was a victim of misogynist laws and policies of the clerical 
regime and their destruction of the economy.

The NCRI Women’s Committee urges the international organization defending human 
rights and women’s rights to intervene and stop the death penalties in Iran.

(source: women-ncr-iran.org)

**********************

Iran Executes Woman In Northeastern City of Mashhad



A woman was hanged at dawn on Sunday, August 25, 2019 in the Central Prison of 
Mashhad, the state-run ROKNA news agency reported today.

The victim who has not been identified by the state media had been found guilty 
of murder.

This is the 94th woman executed in Iran during Hassan Rouhani’s term in office 
since 2013.

The execution of women is higher in Iran than in any other place in the world 
and the Iranian regime is a record holder by executing 94 women during 6 years 
of Rouhani’s tenure.

Last month Iran unprecedentedly executed 4 wemen in just 8 days.

Maliheh Salehian from Miandoab was hanged on July 16, 2019, in the Central 
Prison of Mahabad, in the western Iranian province of Kurdistan.

Zahra Safari Moghaddam, 43, was hanged in the Prison of Nowshahr, northern 
Iran, on July 17, 2019.

Arasteh Ranjbar and Nazdar Vatankhah, 2 in-laws who had already spent 15 years 
in prison, were hanged in the Central Prison of Urmia, northwestern Iran, on 
July 23, 2019.

The U.N. expert on human rights in Iran said in a report to the General 
Assembly circulated August 16, last year saw continuing violations of the right 
to life, liberty and a fair trial in the Islamic Republic, including 253 
reported executions of adults and children.

Javaid Rehman said while the number of executions was the lowest since 2007, 
“the number of executions remains one of the highest in the world.”

(source: iran-hrm.org)








CZECH REPUBIC:

Letters bring to life prison experience of Alice Masaryk facing execution for 
treason during WWI



T.G. Masaryk’s daughter Alice was imprisoned in 1915 for treason, a charge that 
carried the death penalty. Her time in a grim jail in Vienna is the focus of 
Charlotte and Alice, a freshly published and highly illuminating collection of 
over 200 letters between her and her US-born mother, Charlotte Masaryk. The 
book is the work of Anne Johnson, an American editor and translator who lives 
in Brno. She explained its genesis when we spoke recently in the city.

“She got sick and I said, You’re in Montana, I’m here, what can I do to cheer 
you up or distract you?

“And she said, Find out something about Charlotte.

“So I went to the Masaryk Archives and said, Hi, what have you got?

“I expected that they would have shelves, or a book, or something.

“They had seven boxes and they hauled them up from the cellar and just sort of 
handed them to me.

“So I went through these boxes: her diaries, birthday cards that people had 
sent her and things like that.

“And in hunting through her things I found this collection of letters between 
her and her daughter Alice, when Alice had been in prison.

“This was already translated into Czech, but it hadn’t been translated into 
English.

“I thought, Well, that would be a good thing for me to do for my friend, to 
cheer her up.

“And so 5 years later it’s done [laughs].”

Why was Alice Masaryk in prison in 1915?

“She was in a cell with people who were being taken out and executed while she 
was there, for much lesser crimes than treason.”

“In 1915 World War I was still going on. Tomáš Masaryk, who would later become 
the president of Czechoslovakia, was living in exile with his younger daughter 
Olga.

“Charlotte and Alice and Herbert were in Prague, sort of holding down the fort 
while he tried to get a government going and get the Austro-Hungarian Empire 
out.

“Herbert died of typhoid in March 1915 and in October of 1915 they came to the 
house and said, We want all of Masaryk’s political papers.

“Alice and Charlotte said, We don’t have them.

“And they said, We think that you do, we think that you’re hiding them and 
we’re going to arrest you and try you for treason – which is the death penalty.

“They took Alice to prison in Vienna so Charlotte was left alone in Prague.”

Did they actually have the papers, do you know?

“She insisted until the end that she didn’t.

“But they seized a lot of her paperwork, including a lot of the artwork that 
her brother Herbert had left behind, which is still missing to this day.

Anne Johnson, photo: Ian WilloughbyAnne Johnson, photo: Ian Willoughby “So they 
may have seized something.”

Was there a serious danger that she could have been executed at that time?

“Yes, definitely.

“She was in a cell with people who were being taken out and executed while she 
was there, for much lesser crimes than treason.

“Charlotte was an American citizen. Alice had worked with Jane Addams in the US 
for some time and they had connections there with social workers.

“While she was in prison, news came out that this young, 36-year-old American 
woman – nothing but a do-gooder – was in prison, because they wanted to catch 
her father.

“A huge letter-writing campaign probably saved her life.”

She and her mother exchanged around 200 letters at this time. What does Alice 
say about the conditions in the prison in Vienna?

“It’s strange to me, because she got to have her own clothes and her own soap 
and her own perfume, even.

“Initially she was imprisoned in Prague, which was much more humane. She had 
pet fish in the cell with her.

“When she went to Vienna, she was rather in shock.

“There were lice, some of the prisoners had scabies. She was in a cell with 
prostitutes and common criminals as well as political prisoners.”

“It must have been terrifying for someone like her, to have between five and 12 
people in the room with her, when she was such an independent person.

“She got a 45-minute walk a day. Two of the highlights of the day that she 
reported were emptying the chamber pots.

“But, for example, she wore a red dress there, because she thought that the 
prison would be grey and drab and that a red dress would help her cheer up.”

Was she just left with the other prisoners, or was she in any way targeted by 
the guards for mistreatment, or anything like that?

“In the beginning she said that they treated her badly.

“But from the reports from her fellow prisoners, it was so obvious that she was 
not meant to be there.

“She taught English lessons and German lessons in the cell. She was just from a 
different world and I think they came to respect her.

Alice Masaryk, photo: archive of Czech RadioAlice Masaryk, photo: archive of 
Czech Radio “But in the beginning I think they treated her a bit like a freak.”

What do the letters tell us about her mental state?

“In the very beginning she was a little bit saucy. Like wearing a red dress to 
cheer herself up and telling the guards that she would prefer a bed without 
lice in it, even though she loved animals.

“Slowly she went through a real mental break.

“The recognition that her father was not going to come and rescue her. That 
maybe nobody was. That she was really probably going to die in this dire 
circumstance – just like she had watched her brother before.

“She wasn’t well. She was taking bromide to help her sleep at night and even so 
wasn’t sleeping.

“She was like you expect somebody in prison to be – not psychically well.”

If she was in prison for eight or nine months and the correspondence was 200 
letters, that’s a lot of writing. Did they have complete freedom to write to 
one another?

“Not at all.

“Every single letter – and this was one of the things that I thought was very 
moving – every letter has a stamp on it from the military attorney.

“They couldn’t talk about Tomáš Masaryk at all. They couldn’t talk about a lot 
of things.”

“So every single letter that they wrote was read.

“And although they had been communicating with each other in English from 
childhood, the letters had to be written in German. So for the most part they 
are.

“Each one has a stamp that says the letter has gone through a censor.

“Some of the letters have parts scratched out where you can see that the censor 
didn’t approve of something.

“For example, Alice asked her mother to send her a book by Jan Hus and that’s 
crossed out.

“That feeling of somebody constantly watching you pour out your soul… They 
couldn’t talk about Tomáš Masaryk at all. They couldn’t talk about a lot of 
things.”

What sense do we get of Alice’s and Charlotte’s relationship from the letters?

“Charlotte had originally been a highly-educated, New York, American woman in 
the sort of suffragette-feminist-pacifist movement.

“When her husband left, when the pressures started, when Herbert died, I think 
she cracked.

“Her heart was already weak and I think it just about broke her.

“She had already transferred the management of the estate to Alice, because she 
trusted Alice to do it well, and when they took Alice she had no-one.

Photo: Anne JohnsonPhoto: Anne Johnson “And she was under constant police 
surveillance.

“What seemed interesting to me in the letters is that through her time in 
prison Alice finally becomes an adult – outward, focused on people – and 
Charlotte sort of fades.

“By the time Alice got back Charlotte was never well again.”

Doesn’t Alice say in the letters that she wants to improve as a person when she 
gets out?

“She constantly wants to improve. In the beginning she’s thinking about just 
studying social work, so that when she gets out she’ll be better prepared.

“But what shifted for me, in the letters, is that she started actually helping 
the people in the cell and using the things that she learned about prison as 
soon as she got out to help prisoners elsewhere.

“It kind of removed her snobbery and removed her feeling that socially 
disadvantaged people were different.”

And she came from a real elite background, I guess, for those days?

“Yes, exactly. So I think she finally understood that it was a luck thing, and 
not an actual superiority.”

How did Alice eventually get out of prison in Vienna?

“It’s not really certain, because of course they’re not going to say that they 
bowed to pressure from the States, from a foreign government, although that’s 
probably true.

“There were volleys of letters going into Vienna and also the US Department of 
State, which probably had an opinion about a person with American heritage 
being executed for wanting democracy.

“First they commuted her sentence from a death sentence to 12 years and then 
they let her go.

“Through her time in prison Alice finally becomes an adult.”

“I don’t know how true this is, but they told her the shock would kill her 
mother if she just went directly home.

“So she went home and stayed nearby. They told Charlotte that she would be 
having company for dinner.

“And this is another thing. This is a family that had been extremely connected 
in Prague, within Prague literary and political circles, and suddenly nobody 
was going to visit her – maybe 1 or 2 people would come.

“She had no source of income.

“So just having a visit was exhausting for her. But they told her that somebody 
was coming for tomorrow and she should get ready.

“And she set the table and then it was Alice.”

During this time did Alice at all correspond with her father in the States?

“Gordon Skilling is a historian who wrote a book about Alice and Charlotte.

“In his book he says that Alice was preparing to correspond with her father, to 
ask him to tell them that she was innocent.

“Because I guess he hadn’t intervened at all, for whatever reason.

“And she was on the verge of doing that when she got set free.”

Tell us about the language aspect. These 200 letters are mostly in German, but 
also mixed with some Czech and English, is that right?

“Yes. You have a Czech wife – there are words that just don’t come to you 
automatically in Czech and there are words that don’t come automatically in 
English, right?

“You sort of have this… Last week I was in the lékárna.

“So there are words that they struggle over and they must put them in either 
English or Czech.

“A couple of times Charlotte just writes in Czech or just writes in English, 
even though she knows it’s going to slow the letters down.

“I think part of her illness was… maybe Alzheimer’s? But she felt herself 
losing Czech.”

How good was her Czech, do we know?

“Supposedly her Czech was excellent.

“She wrote articles for newspapers here. Of course, we can’t know how edited 
they were.

“My Czech isn’t perfect, but in looking at the things that she wrote in Czech I 
would say that they were good – certainly understandable.”

If most of the text was in German originally, who translated the German?

“I have a friend [Michael O’Rourke] who’s American and lives in Austria and has 
lived there for longer than I’ve been here [since 1994].

“We’ve worked on a lot of projects together and he’s super fun.

“He translated the German. He doesn’t speak Czech.

“These are handwritten letters and what he did was go through and write all the 
words that he knew and then if he came to a word he didn’t know he just drew a 
little line and then kept going.

“Then I got it and went through and filled in the words that I knew.

“Then because the letters had already been translated into Czech, Tereza 
Semotamová, who’s a German translator, went and compared our translation with 
the Czech translation and pointed out any places that it was inconsistent.

“And then Mick and I went back to the originals and tried to verify that our 
translation was correct.”

How can people acquire this book, if they’re interested?

“I self-published the book. I just couldn’t find a publisher who was as 
passionate about it as I was.

“It’s going to be available on Amazon at full price and through Lulu, which is 
how I published it, at 20 % discount, which I think is 13 dollars.”

(source: radio.cz)








CHINA:

Australian author could face the death penalty in China



Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is facing the death penalty in China, according 
to his lawyers.

The prominent pro-democracy campaigner has been detained in Beijing for 7 
months, and today it was confirmed that he has been formally arrested on spying 
charges.

The Australian-Chinese author and academic is a prominent critic of Beijing, 
and has been detained since January.

(source: abc.net.au)








PAKISTAN:

SC acquits murder convict after 15 years



The Supreme Court on Monday acquitted murder convict Shafqat Hussain after 15 
years, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

The trial court awarded the capital punishment to Hussain over the murder of 
Jamil Haider in Jhang district in 2004.

The Lahore High Court had converted the death sentence into life imprisonment. 
The convict later challenged the LHC order in the Supreme Court.

A 3-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khan 
Khosa, heard the case through a video link from the Lahore Registry of the 
Supreme Court.

During the course of proceedings, the chief justice said that the prosecution 
had failed to prove the case as it could not justify the presence of witnesses 
at the place of the incident.

He said that murder was a big crime but the murder of justice was an even 
bigger crime.

After hearing arguments, the court ordered release of the convict, giving him 
the benefit of the doubt.

(source: dawn.com)








PHILIPPINES:

‘Hanging judge’ favors death penalty



The “hanging judge” who sentenced “Waway” and “Baby China” to death is in favor 
of reviving the death penalty.

Retired Justice Manuel Pamaran, 94, said restoring the death penalty would 
address the country’s peace and order.

“With the peace and order that we are having now, the return of the death 
penalty is needed. It is the demand of the times,” Pamaran told reporters after 
the commemoration of National Heroes Day at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in 
Taguig City yesterday.

He said he prefers criminals to be executed by hanging, a method initially 
backed by President Duterte.

Pamaran said he meted death sentence to at least 60 people when he was a judge.

Debates about the restoration of death penalty were revived after it was 
announced that convicted rapist and murderer Antonio Sanchez may be released 
early from prison due to good behavior.

The justice department later retracted, saying Sanchez is not covered by the 
Good Conduct Time Allowance Law because he committed a heinous crime.

(source: philstar.com)








BANGLADESH:

War crimes verdict against Puthia's Samad on Tuesday



The war crimes tribunal has fixed Tuesday to deliver its verdict in the case 
against Md Abdus Samad, alias Feroz Khan, over his alleged crimes against 
humanity during the Liberation War.

Samad has been charged with murder, genocide, looting and arson in the case.

A three-member panel of the International Crimes Tribunal led by Justice 
Shahinur Islam announced the date for the verdict on Monday.

The tribunal deferred the verdict for further deliberation (CAV) on Jul 8 after 
hearing the arguments of both sides in the case.

“We have presented the evidence and witness testimonies of the atrocities 
including murder and genocide, committed by the Pakistani occupation force 
along with their aides in this country during the arguments in the case,” 
Prosecutor Zahid Imam told bdnews24.com.

“The victims as well as 14 eye witnesses from their families have testified. 
Therefore, we have appealed for the death penalty to be handed out to the 
accused.”

The Samad's legal counsel Abdus Sattar, however, cast doubt on the credibility 
of the witnesses in the case, most of whom are members of the Santhal community 
in Puthia and had a land dispute with the accused’s father.

“They had exchanged land and came to the country in 1964. But after the 
independence of Bangladesh, the Santhals demanded 50 acres of land back," he 
said.

"The accused's father was subsequently killed in a clash with the Santhals 
stemming from the land dispute. Now the witnesses are taking advantage of the 
incident and making false allegations against the defendant.”

“This is basically a case of conflict over land and an isolated incident. I 
believe we have been successful in proving that to the court and therefore, 
appealed for the acquittal of the defendant,” he added.

The trial proceedings of the case began on Sept 9 last year.

(source: bdnews24.com)