Iran rushes a woman to the gallows

In case you hadn't noticed, the ruling regime in Iran is a throwback to barbarism. Latest case in point: Delara Darabi.

The prison authorities hanged Miss Darabi, 23, even though the head of Iran's judiciary granted her a two-month stay of execution on April 19 amid international outrage over her case. They also did not give her lawyer the required 48 hours notice.

Horrific new details have emerged of her last desperate plea for help from Rasht prison as jail guards came to lead her away.

Miss Darabi made a tearful call early on Friday to her parents to say she could see the gallows and noose, according to media reports from Tehran.

"Mother they are going to execute me, please save me," she pleaded. But a prison official then grabbed the phone and told her distraught mother: "We are going to execute your daughter and there's nothing you can do about it."

Apart from the rank cruelty of taunting her parents by telephone as they dragged her to the gallows, the regime's treatment of Ms. Darabi has other dark implications.

The execution of a young woman whose case has become an international cause célèbre is a further damaging blow to President Barack Obama's attempts to thaw US relations with the Islamic regime. Roxana Saberi, an American-Iranian journalist, is on hunger strike in a Tehran prison after being convicted of espionage in a show trial last month.

Miss Darabi's case gained widespread attention after moving paintings and drawings that she made in her prison cell were shown around the world. She developed her talent as a painter behind bars.

Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are the only countries to execute people for crimes committed when they are under 18. Miss Darabi was 17 when she admitted killing her 58-year-old uncle in a burglary in 2003 but she quickly retracted the confession, saying she had taken the blame to save her boyfriend.

I am a firm believer in capital punishment in the USA, and even disagree with the ban here on executing minors -- I think a 16-year-old has the capacity to act as an adult and should be punished as one if he or she is guilty of capital murder.

But I don't support executing a person whose guilt is not conclusively proven, whose due process in the judicial system has not been taken to its conclusion and whose execution violates all of the standards and safeguards that a society places on its own criminal justice system. It's plain that the execution of Ms. Darabi was a political demonstration that the Iranians will do with their citizens and their policies whatever they wish, without regard to outside influence... other than the military kind, that is.

As the article notes, that bodes ill for the American journalist Roxana Saberi. It also bodes ill for the prospect of a peaceful negotiated resolution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear programs. (But I hear tell the Israeli Air Force is practicing long-range air-to-air refueling.)

EU develops time machine

The BBC reports that the European Union urged Texas to declare a moratorium on capital punishment, and that the Governor of Texas in response urged the EU to stick it where the sun don't shine.

The statement from the Portuguese presidency of the 27-nation bloc said: "The European Union strongly urges Governor Rick Perry to exercise all powers vested in his office to halt all upcoming executions and to consider the introduction of a moratorium in the state of Texas."

It continued: "There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice, which are inevitable in all legal systems, cannot be redressed."

But Robert Black, a spokesman for the Texas governor, told the BBC News website: "Two hundred and thirty years ago, our forefathers fought a war to throw off the yoke of a European monarch and gain the freedom of self-determination.

"Texans long ago decided the death penalty is a just and appropriate punishment for the most horrible crimes committed against our citizens.

"While we respect our friends in Europe ... Texans are doing just fine governing Texas."

Let's examine this EU assertion more closely: "There is no evidence to suggest that the use of the death penalty serves as a deterrent against violent crime and the irreversibility of the punishment means that miscarriages of justice, which are inevitable in all legal systems, cannot be redressed."

Is the EU representative actually saying that an undeserved prison sentence can be reversed after it is served? Prison deprives the prisoner of something as ephemeral as life itself: time.

Indeed, the blase attitude toward prison reflected in the EU's statement is the reason that Death Row inmates have a much greater probability of having their cases reviewed and scrutinized in every last detail than do inmates sentenced to prison terms, however long. For some reason, the nature of the death penalty itself is presumed to make the Death Row inmate more deserving of this sort of extraordinary legal assistance -- while across the United States, far more man-years are robbed from innocent men wrongly convicted but sentenced to ordinary prison terms.

If the EU really has a time machine that can give a wrongfully convicted prisoner back the years he's lost, they should share it with Texas. I bet the high-tech wizards in the Austin corridor could figure out how to jury-rig the thing to give murder victims back their lives.

The "they're going to anyway" fallacy

Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times takes Hillary Clinton to task for pandering to a Black audience (specifically National Association of Black Journalists conventioneers) by lamenting the "black male crisis":

I can't say with certainty that Clinton doesn't ever mention "It takes a village to raise a child" when addressing white audiences, but the African proverb is usually tossed out at least once when she's speaking to a black one.

In fact, the speech she delivered during what was billed as "A Conversation with America's Candidates" was Clinton's urban manifesto.

The former first lady lamented the crisis of 1.4 million young black males between the ages of 16 and 24 "who are out of school and out of work and too often out of hope," and pointed out that nearly one out of every three young African-American men are not "earning legal wages or learning marketable skills.

"They grow up without fathers, wind up in prison, or end up losing their lives, or taking lives due to guns and violence," Clinton said. "We've been wringing our hands and listening to this exact same conversation for years. Well, I reject that conversation. I reject a conversation that paints with a broad brush 1.4 million young men as a threat, as a headache, or as a lost cause. I reject it as a string of disappointments, failures, casualties of a broken system. It is not who they are and not what they can be. I think it is time we shifted the conversation."

I wholeheartedly agree.

This is a conversation that should be shifted to the white establishment across America where jobs, resources and political clout are controlled.

Both Mrs. Clinton ("it take a village") and Ms. Mitchell ("the white establishment") look for explanations outside the African-American community for crime in that community, which is overwhelmingly Black-on-Black crime. Mrs. Clinton fails to understand that the programs of the Great Society have stripped many of the the "villages" in the African-American community of their male elder role models and left their female elders to deal on their own with feeding and raising the young folks. Ms. Mitchell, for her part, thinks that Black folks can't help themselves when "the white establishment" controls jobs, resources and political clout: she desperately needs to re-read Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington.

But it's obviously that Ms. Mitchell thinks that Mrs. Clinton's shame ought not to lie in her reliance on tired old liberal slogans rather than effective programs to combat crime in the Black community. No, Ms. Mitchell blames Mrs. Clinton's husband for making the laws unfair.

So it was pandering on Clinton's part to show up and paint herself as the possible savior of 1.4 million lost black souls. Because the truth of the matter is the root of the "black male crisis" can be traced back to the Clinton era.

In a rare private interview with a group of black columnists from across the country, Clinton was reminded that the explosion in the prison population -- which has led to a whole host of social ills in the black community -- was spawned, in part, by Bill Clinton's decision to sign a bill that created the wide disparity in the way people are punished for crimes involving crack cocaine, compared to those who are prosecuted for powder cocaine.

This is a classic illustration of the "they're going to anyway" fallacy. Since young Black men are going to deal crack cocaine anyway, why punish them disproportionately to powder cocaine dealers, if not out of sheer racism?

The truth is, something that incurs severe penalties generally is practiced less than if it incurred light penalties, or none. If young Black men are somehow culturally prone to dealing crack cocaine, then subjecting crack dealing to Draconian penalties ought to disproportionately benefit the Black community by getting its young men away from the crack trade.

But are all the young Black men in U.S. prisons there for crack dealing? What about murder?

The U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that murder rates -- victims and perpetrators -- vary greatly between whites and Blacks.

In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites

The race distribution of homicide victims and offenders differs by type of homicide
For the years 1976-2005 combined -

Black victims are over represented in homicides involving drugs. Compared with the overall involvement of blacks as victims, blacks are less often the victims of sex-related homicides, workplace killings, and homicide by poison.

Race patterns among offenders are similar to those among victims.

From 1976 to 2005 --

86% of white victims were killed by whites
94% of black victims were killed by blacks

Stranger homicides are more likely to cross racial lines than those that involve friends or acquaintances
For homicides committed by --

-- a friend or acquaintance of the victim, less than one-tenth (8%) were interracial
-- a stranger to the victim, one-quarter were interracial

You know what related aspect of the criminal justice system shows a racial disparity? Capital punishment, according to the BJS.

Of persons executed in 2006:
-- 32 were white
-- 21 were black

Of persons under sentence of death in 2005:
-- 1,805 were white
-- 1,372 were black
-- 31 were American Indian
-- 34 were Asian
-- 12 were of unknown race.

Let's see. Black perpetrators made up 52.2% of all homicide perpetrators from 1976 to 2005, but represent only 42.2% of Death Row inmates and about the same percentage of persons executed. Since most Black murderers killed Black victims (as most white murderers killed white victims), the prima facie conclusion would be that juries and judges just don't sentence the killers of Black people to death as often as they do the killers of whites.

Maybe if Black victims got the same degree of justice -- that is, prosecutors seeking the death penalty in their murders as often as in the cases of white victims -- the rate of homicide of Blacks would drop. Again, that might result in fewer Black men going to prison -- unless you believe that Black men are going to kill people anyway, regardless of consequences.