Our judges were very inexperienced. To give you an example, they brought to me a case where the judge had written this as his verdict: “In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, execution.”
Execute who? For what reason? The judge had simply written one word without mentioning his reasons, not even the convict’s name. Just the word “execution” and his signature were there and you could arrest and execute anyone with a verdict like this! That was our judiciary in those years: they arrested people with great speed and then there were immediate calls for execution.
Once I was in Najafabad and I was told about two persons who had been sentenced to death. One was the thirteen-year-old daughter of Haj Taqi Rajai. I knew their family well; they were pious and lived in Najafabad. The other was Mr. Lessen, who had been a good friend of my son. They were said to have been influenced and recruited by the People’s Mojahedin, and were sentenced to execution for this reason.
I must point out here that one of the things that should have been done after the revolution’s victory was to organize and guide these revolutionary forces.
The People’s Mojahedin identified and recruited them in an organized manner. People looked on them favorably and young people were deluded by their slogans. People who were being arrested and interrogated for belonging to the Mojahedin should have been treated in a subtle and wise way and if they had been handled correctly, it would have been possible to turn them away from the Mojahedin.
They told me that these two persons had been sentenced to death. I asked what they had been charged with. They said the thirteen-year-old girl had been asked by the interrogator: “Don’t you believe in the Imam if you are saying these things?” She said with youthful pride: “No, I don’t.”
I once told the Imam: “If someone says I like Massoud Rajavi more than the mullahs, and I don’t like Mr. Khomeini, but I have nothing to do with politics and I am just minding my own business, and if we know he is telling the truth, should we jail him?” The Imam replied: “No, why should we?”
I never thought that these two persons would be executed any time soon, and said to myself that I would follow up their cases later. But they came to me the next day and said: “The two of them were executed last night!”
I was utterly shocked. The same sort of things was going on everywhere else in the country and I was by and large informed of them…
Arbitrary Justice
RELATED ARTICLES
