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Nothing Says You're in Charge like an Execution

By Jonathan Simor

According to Rod Nordland's reporting in the NYTimes, the Taliban ordered and carried out their first public execution in Afghanistan in nine years this past Sunday, stoning to death a young couple charged with eloping. The victims, a nineteen year old woman and a twenty-five year old man had eloped after relatives refused their request to marry. She was pledged to another man, a relative of her lover, he was married and had two children (but polygamy is legal under Islamic law). After the couple fled to a different village, they were persuaded to return, only to be seized by the Taliban and after a judgment of some sort, stoned to death by an all male crowd of more than 200 men, including Taliban activists, but also relatives of both.The barbarity of stoning is a cultural judgment call (I consider lethal injection its moral equivalent)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on August 17, 2010 (boomark / email).