Seyed Mohammad Hosseini is such an ordinary name that it is difficult to remember, but the promise I made to myself today was never to forget this name.

Mohammad was an orphan and did not even have a family who could visit him one last time. He was so alone that, apart from a few photographs from his brief court hearing and one blurred photograph from several years earlier, almost no other image of him was published.

The only person who ever visited him in prison was the lawyer Ali Sharifzadeh, who was able to see him after the trial ended and the sentence was announced.

A lawyer who could not remain silent and spoke of the injustice and the suffering of his utter aloneness; of severe torture in a story filled with sighs and tears: from beatings while his eyes, hands and feet were bound, to kicks to the head and loss of consciousness; from an iron bar against the soles of his feet to electric shocks across his body.

Dostoevsky, who himself experienced an encounter with execution, once wrote in the rendering given here:
There is nothing more inhuman and cruel in execution than torturing the condemned person by telling them the hour and moment of their execution.

It is the experience of knowing that the moment will arrive, that the key of death will turn in the lock of your cell and they will come to take you away, while until the final moment it remains difficult to believe what is passing over you like a nightmare, and hope is the last human feeling to leave your heart.

In no other form of death—whether war, accident, catastrophe or even murder—is there this particular torture and inhuman violence of knowing in advance the exact time and manner of one’s death.

In Dostoevsky’s view, as presented here—his own life having been spared at the final moment—no torture or violence in the world equals such cruelty when power exercises it in the name of society.

The fundamental problem with capital punishment is not only that it reduces a vast idea such as justice to the primitive and violence-filled understanding of this noble concept attributed here to prehistoric humanity. It simultaneously diminishes the image of both governing power and the people of a society, reducing them to a power and a society willing to be so small that their understanding of “power” is nothing beyond control and intimidation, and their understanding of “justice” nothing beyond prison and the gallows.

What such powers do not understand, however, is that what ultimately destroys them is their inability to solve all the problems that cannot be solved by gallows, prisons, control and the humiliation of citizens.

Go, then, and solve the problems of the economy, environmental destruction and pollution, poverty and corruption, dissatisfied citizens, the flight of expertise, and an economy described here as collapsing—with gallows and prisons.

Aydin Areta