ExecutedToday.com

On this day in 2000, Russian national Dmitry (or Dmitri) Chikunov was secretly put to death* in Tashkent, Uzbekistan for the murder of two men.

A symbolic grave for Dmitry Chikunov; his actual resting place is unknown.

His mother, who had been shooed away from the prison on a previous visit with a demand that she come back later, only learned of the execution when she attempted to visit him two days later.** She has never learned where he was buried.

However, Tamara Chikunova turned out to be the type to turn grief into action.

She became a prominent human rights and anti-death penalty activist in Uzbekistan (and globally); her Mothers Against the Death Penalty and Torture organization was troublesome enough that the government blocked one of its conferences in 2003.

Well, Gandhi said it — “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” On January 1, 2008, Uzbekistan abolished the death penalty.

Tamara Chikunova discusses the rampant official corruption and malfeasance endemic in Uzbekistan’s (former) death penalty, and the issues still ahead for her organization, in this interview.

* Dmitry Chikunov’s execution by gunshot took place only nine months after trial; it’s hardly a surprise that Dmitry claimed to have been tortured into confession.

** In this French article, Chikunova says her son was actually shot while she herself was in the prison attempting to visit him.

Also On This Date

• 2007: Zheng Xiaoyu, former Director of the State Food and Drug Administration

One year ago today, China made to clean up its image — with public health advocates, if not with human rights advocates — by executing* its former Food and Drugs minister for economic crimes.

Zheng Xiaoyu, China’s drug regulation capo from 1994 to 2005 and only (”only”?) the fourth minister-level official to be put to death in China since the immediate aftermath of Mao Zedong’s reign, was sentenced for extracting bribes from pharmaceutical companies he nominally regulated in exchange for approving their worthless and/or unsafe products.

One bogus antibiotic he rubber-stamped killed ten in China before it was pulled from the market, but it was dangerous Chinese products exported abroad — including lethal pet food ingredients to the United States and a cough syrup that killed dozens in Panama — that lit a fire under the export-driven colossus. The court that rejected his appeal explicitly referenced Zheng’s danger to China’s international reputation — simultaneously shifting focus from structural weaknesses by individualizing them to Zheng’s personal failings.

On this same day it announced Zheng’s death, China anxiously unveiled plans to safeguard the food supply for its upcoming turn under the Olympic klieg lights. That acid test is now upon it: opening ceremonies are mere weeks away as of this writing.

It may have been a politically-driven execution and an unusually heavy sentence, but Zheng’s passing was exulted in China. Someone even tried to put his name on a rat poison — rejected for that most distinguished reason of modern capitalism, Zheng’s own intellectual property in his name.

For an interesting dive into the social and legal currents surrounding this case, check out this .pdf edition of Criminal Bar Quarterly.

* The method of execution was not announced, and to my knowledge has not been conclusively documented. Gunshot was the longtime standby for Chinese executions, but China has shifted heavily towards lethal injection in recent years; it’s generally assumed that Zheng suffered the latter fate.

Also On This Date

• 2000: Dmitry Chikunov, secretly