The West, Iran and the Death Penalty

Memo to the Western world: humanity starts at home

Guy Rundle
September 12, 2010

We need to remember that Iran does not have a monopoly on barbarism.

IN AN isolated prison cell, a woman sits, waiting to be executed. The method is one laid down by tradition. Reports say it can be excruciatingly painful and terrifying. There are doubts as to whether she received a fair trial, and most people regard the system under which she was convicted as hopelessly compromised. She is unlikely to receive mercy because the person who could grant it believes deeply that such punishments are ordained by God. Barred from sustained contact with the outside world, she waits, and waits.

Many readers might assume that I'm describing the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian facing death by stoning for alleged crimes associated with adultery. In fact, the woman in question is Teresa Lewis, now in a Virginia prison in the United States and scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 23.

Ashtiani's plight is horrific, but Lewis's fate should give anyone of conscience pause to consider the contradictions and hypocrisies of much human rights campaigning these days.

Lewis's case would be easy to pass by. In 2003 she was convicted of conspiring with two men to murder her husband and stepson, for a share of $250,000 insurance and sexual favours from her and her 16-year-old daughter. Though she pleaded guilty and gave information that helped police arrest the killers, she was sentenced to death, while the men got life sentences.

Still, it's a brutal crime, compared to alleged adultery - except that Ashtiani was sentenced for the same crime: conspiracy to kill her husband. Nevertheless, this was based on undisclosed ''information supplied to the judges''. Lewis had a fair trial, right? Well, not exactly. As well as excluding evidence that Lewis had a mind-altering addiction to prescription painkillers, her IQ was found to be about 70, Virginia's borderline for intellectual disability. Several years after the verdict, one of the killers, Matthew Shellenberger, confessed the murders were his idea and that he spotted Lewis as someone who could be easily manipulated - but the letter in which he confessed this was excluded from appeals evidence.

The typical scenario of a low-life criminal duo? No. Lewis had no violent criminal record. The addiction developed from over-prescription. Shellenberger, a high-IQ sociopathic career criminal, picked her up in a supermarket. The judge, giving her death and the men life, called her the ''head of the serpent'' in the conspiracy, something of a clue to the uneven sentencing.

Like Ashtiani, Lewis is caught in a judicial system that uses death for political purposes - in the US, the re-election of state prosecutors amid a culture of fear. But why does Ashtiani's case engage our horror, while Lewis's simply makes us recoil from the grotesqueries of American law and order? The answer, I suggest, is that both are horrific - but Ashtiani's case is in a pre-modern alien way, while Lewis's is an impeccably modern and familiar process of barbarity.

Ashtiani was railroaded by a secretive court that may well have added the conspiracy charge to muddy the issue globally. But Lewis was flung into a system where money buys acquittal and a rigid appeals process gives the illusion of fairness while frustrating any attempt to consider execution as the singular, momentous act it is. Compared to the unthinkable process of stoning, lethal injection seems smooth and humane. But like stoning, it's a culturally determined idea of killing by ''right''. As Jeff Sparrow documents in his recent book Killing, it's the latest in a long line of American can-do, from Edison's electric chair onwards.

The chair wasn't ''humane'' and neither is lethal injection. We now know that, in many cases, the cocktail of drugs employed first paralyses the victim before subjecting them to excruciating, but silent, pain.

Whether lethal injection is better than stoning is a moot point, but it's certainly easier on the witnesses. And that goes to the heart of the twinned fates of Ashtiani and Lewis. For it's the very way in which the campaign to save Ashtiani has been constructed in terms of ''Enlightenment'' and ''modernity'' that ensures Lewis's fate can be written off as a freak occurrence - rather than seen as an expression of ''modernity'' in its most chillingly anti-human mode. It's the bandwagon for Ashtiani, with Bernard Henri-Levy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others climbing on, to protest against barbarity; it's the tumbril for Lewis, to demonstrate what backward societies should aspire to. Such small hypocrisies guarantee greater ones: an obsession in the West with the culture of ''honour'' killings, while the no less culturally determined slaughter of women by their partners is a paragraph on the crime page. Outrage at Taliban brutality, compared to the ''clean'' deaths visited by Western bombs.

Those who set these news priorities couldn't give a damn about Iranian women. Those who do need to ensure saving the life of Ashtiani does not legitimate the death of Teresa Lewis, and thousands of others.

Guy Rundle is the author of Down to the Crossroads: On the US 2008 Campaign Trail.