Iranian woman to be whipped not stoned for adultery

Tehran: Iran's judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi has commuted a sentence of stoning to death handed down to a woman convicted of adultery to 100lashes, a report said yesterday. The woman identified only as 48-year-old Kobra N, was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of her husband and engaging in an adulterous relationship, the daily Etemad Melli newspaper reported. She was sentenced to eight years in prison for the first crime and stoning to death for the second.

The report said the woman served the eight-year jail sentence and was kept in prison for another five years awaiting the sentence of stoning to be carried out. It added that her husband, a drug addict, had forced her into prostitution. The murderer, identified as Habib A, has been freed after serving a 10-year jail term.

According to the newspaper, Ayatollah Shahrudi's decision to spare the woman leaves nine other people, seven women and two men, in Iranian prisons awaiting execution by stoning.

Iran's judiciary last week confirmed two men had been stoned to death for adultery in the northeastern city of Mashhad in December while a third struggled from teh stoning hole and escaped with his life. Under Iran's Islamic law, adultery is still theoretically punishable by stoning which involves the public hurling stones at the convict buried up to her shoulders. Convicts are spared if they can free themselves. Aside from December's stonings in Mashad, five Iranians have reportedly been stoned to death in the past four years despite a 2002 directive by Ayatollah Shahrudi imposing a moratorium on such executions.

In August, the judiciary said it had scrapped the punishment in Iran's new Islamic penal code, whose outlines have been adopted by parliament but whose details are yet to be debated by MP's before final approval.

How can someone react to such piece of information? Do we say oh thanks God, good for them its whipping and not stoning? Or maybe thank you Mr. Shahrudi for sparing the women the stoning? Or maybe thank you to that editor from Etemad Daily that reported the adultery in the first place?

I don't get this. We live in the 21st century and there are still people, regimes, laws that think they are the one true reality and somehow try to substitute God on Earth. What is the goal behind such laws, regimes, etc.? Is it trying to clean up humanity from its flaws or maybe vacuuming all the dirt from our societies? Who gave them the right and what happened to the non-blind folded people of this earth?

(original source AFP)