Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman convicted of adultery, has avoided death by stoning … for now.
On Thursday, Iran issued a statement claiming the 43-year-old mother of two, who has been imprisoned since 2006 when she was found guilty (under questionable circumstances) of an illicit relationship while still married, “will not be executed by stoning punishment.”
The statement didn’t make clear whether Ashtiani, who has already been subjected to 99 lashes for her alleged breach of Islamic law, would be executed under other means. Iran regularly sentences criminals to die by hanging. In 2009, Iran executed more than 388 people, according to Amnesty International, second only to China, who executed more people than the rest of the world combined.
Ashtiani may have avoided her sentence for now because of widespread public outcry against the execution. Faraz Sanei, an Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, tells Newsweek he received more than 10,000 emails just this week condemning Ashtiani’s execution. Big names like Robert De Niro, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, John Kerry, Condoleezza Rice and even Lindsay Lohan decried Ashtiani’s imminent execution. On the same day that she was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating parole, Lohan tweeted the link to a Newsweek article that refers to the specifics of stoning under the Iranian penal code:
The “stones used should ‘not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes; nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones.’”
Ashtiani was initially found guilty of adultery in May 2006, when an East Azerbaijan court determined she had an “illicit relationship” with two men after her husband had died. She and the two men involved endured 99 lashes for that offense. Later that year, Ashtiani was accused of involvement in the murder of her husband. Though the charges were dropped, another court introduced a new adultery charge against Ashtiani, claiming she had engaged in adultery before her husband’s death. Ashtiani confessed, but retracted the confession, claiming she had made it under duress. Under a rule called “judge’s knowledge,” which empowers Iranian judges to convict and sentence without evidence, Ashtiani was sentenced to death in late 2006.
She maintains her innocence to this day.
Photo via Amnesty International.