The new 'modern' and 'civilized' Iran has allowed their judiciary system to sentence a woman to death by stoning for adultery. There were no witnesses to the alleged crime.
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Ashtiani, 42, will be buried up to her chest, according to an Amnesty International report citing the Iranian penal code. The stones that will be hurled at her will be large enough to cause pain but not so large as to kill her immediately.
Ashtiani, who is from the northern city of Tabriz, was convicted of adultery in 2006.
She was forced to confess after being subjected to 99 lashes, human rights lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei said Thursday in a telephone interview from Tehran.
She later retracted that confession and has denied wrongdoing. Her conviction was based not on evidence but on the determination of three out of five judges, Mostafaei said. She has asked forgiveness from the court but the judges refused to grant clemency.
Iran's supreme court upheld the conviction in 2007.
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Article 74 of the Iranian penal code requires at least four witnesses -- four men or three men and two women -- for an adulterer to receive a stoning sentence, said Ahadi, of the International Committee Against Stoning. But there were no witnesses in Ashtiani's case. Often, said Ahadi, husbands turn wives in to get out of a marriage.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/me...id=QCcperPfDb1
Her two children may now grow up without a mother because of the barbaric belief that totalitarianism is the only proper way to govern ourselves.