Why this is not more widely known?

Someone posted this comment on Mondoweiss in regards to the stoning sentence of a woman in Iran..Here he writes of another comment made that doesn't seem to be in accord with what we hear everywhere:

It seems the whole story about stoning to death is nonsense. Here is a comment by b (Bernhardt) formerly of moonofalabama.com posted at Pat Lang’s sic semper tyranis blog.

“There is a lot of propaganda around this story and hardly a fact reported in the western media.

From what I gathered:

1. The woman was sentenced by a low court for aiding and abetting to murder her husband and for adultery and the punishment of stoning to death.

But in July the highest Iranian court judged that this was invalid and that the lower courts opinion was false.

There simply is no case anymore against that woman for adultery and there is no legal sentence of stoning her to death. It simply doesn’t exist anymore.

2. There is a sentence against the woman for aiding and abetting to the murder of her husband. That sentence is to 10 years of prison.

So far the facts.

Since 2002 stoning is abolished in Iran. While it is still on the books, it is no longer used.

Stoning:

The Iranian judiciary officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002, although the punishment remained on the books, and there were a few cases of Judges handing down stoning sentences in 2006 and 2007 [21] In 2008, Iran’s judiciary decided to fully scrap the punishment from the books in a legislation submitted to parliament for approval.[22] As of June 2009, Iran’s parliament has been reviewing and revising the Islamic penal code to omit stoning as a form of punishment.[23]
…
In July 2010, the Iranian judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad was quoted as saying “Stoning has been dropped from the penal code for a long time, and in the Islamic republic, we do not see such punishments being carried out”, further adding that if stoning sentences were passed by lower courts, they were over-ruled by higher courts and “no such verdicts have been carried out.”[26]

A crazy judgment by a lower court is certainly not something unusual even in the U.S.

So what is all the fuzz about if not for simple Iran bashing to prepare the public for war against Iran?”

Posted by: b | 06 September 2010 at 08:16 AM

Comment posted by Lysander(mondoweiss). Here