Yearly Archives: 2008

2004: Jerry McWee, a former policeman

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On this date in 2004, South Carolina executed a man who had once been on the other side of the law.

Jerry Bridwell McWee hardly fit the profile of a future death row inmate when he met one George Scott. McWee was pushing 40, had no criminal record, and had once done a stint as an Augusta, Ga., police officer.

But it wasn’t many months that the two had iced a couple of Aiken County denizens in a hunt for drug money.*

It may have worked to Scott’s advantage that he was a career criminal, and had the instinct to turn state’s evidence before his confederate could send him to the gurney. Even so, it took some wheedling to get a death sentence out of the jury, which was clearly better inclined to give McWee life. A law (since reversed) at that time forbade advising jurors on parole scenarios, so the jury’s repeated pleas to know when the prisoner might be released under a life sentence — actual answer: age 71, at the earliest — were denied.

It was bum luck for Jerry under the circumstances, but also a mess of his own making; there was no question of innocence or some other mitigating point that gave him any likelihood of winning South Carolina’s first executive clemency.

The invaluable archives at the Clark County (Ind.) prosecutor’s web page collect news stories about every modern execution in the United States. On Jerry McWee’s page, an Associated Press report from the death chamber sketches an affecting portrat of two families’ grief.

In his final statement read by his lawyer, McWee asked both his own family and [victim John] Perry’s family to forgive him. “I only wished that things could have been different,” McWee wrote. “I would give anything if only that could have been the case.” A tear formed in his eye as his mother blew a kiss back at him and his final words were read. That tear finally rolled down the side of his head moments after he stopped breathing. More than 10 minutes later, McWee was officially declared dead at 6:18 p.m.

Celia McWee softly sobbed, a well-wadded tissue in her hand, as she waited for prison officials to open the curtain to the death chamber. She gasped “Oh my God” and her cries got louder as the curtain opened and she saw her clean-shaven son strapped to the gurney, his arms extended, and intravenous tubes stretching through a nearby wall. A minister put his hand on her shoulder. After glancing at his mother, Jerry McWee looked back at the ceiling, softly mumbling as the tubes shuddered. He blinked several times and his breathing got shallow, then stopped. Celia McWee’s sobs got softer as it was obvious McWee was no longer breathing. But she never took her eyes off her son.

A member of Perry’s family also witnessed the execution, and his gaze never left McWee’s body either. After the execution, Perry’s wife and family issued a statement thanking the community, law enforcement and prosecutors and saying it was not a time to rejoice. “God has given us free will – we are each responsible for our actions,” part of the statement read. “Please make choices you can live with. Please pray for the soul of Jerry B. McWee.”

The executed man’s mother, Celia McWee, also lost a daughter to murder in 1980; she had been, and remains, a mainstay of the anti-death penalty movement. On this biographical page, she sets the scene through a mother’s eyes.

One day Jerry came to my work. We said hello but I was still angry and didn’t ask if he wanted to talk. I thought, “If you’re going through a hard time, then good, because now you’re being punished for what you did.” To this day I’ll never forgive myself for not reaching out to him.

…

Jerry didn’t want me to witness the execution but I fought tooth and nail to be there. I couldn’t let him die in front of a room full of strangers. … The wife of Jerry’s victim wasn’t there, and I would say she’s the most sympathetic person I’ve ever known. She never publicly denounced what my son did, nor did she ever call for his execution.

Just before the lethal injection, Jerry turned to take a good long look at me and then blew me a kiss. After that he closed his eyes and I watched the blood drain from his face. I don’t know what could be harder than watching your son die like that. A mother does not see a 30, 40, 50-year-old man strapped to that cross-like gurney. She sees the child she gave birth to, the child that in her eyes never grew up.

* In two separate crimes, each had been the triggerman once. Formally, McWee was executed only for the first murder, a clerk McWee had shot in the course of robbing a convenience store of $350. He subsequently pleaded guilty to the second murder, for which he received a life sentence; Scott did likewise.

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1947: Fernand de Brinon, Vichy minister with a Jewish wife

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On this date in 1947, former Vichy Secretary of State Comte Fernand de Brinon was shot in the Paris suburb of Montrouge for war crimes.

A lawyer and journalist who met future Nazi luminary Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1919, Brinon and his socialite wife Lisette were the toast of right-wing high society in the 1930’s. He even scored a scoop interview with the Fuhrer himself, shortly after Hitler became chancellor.

Germany’s rout of France in 1940 vindicated to many of the French right their critiques of France’s decadence; for Brinon, the natural step was support for collaboration, a career-enhancing philosophy that saw him to the third-ranking position of the Vichy government.

There he struck a post-partisan, consensus-oriented pose vis-a-vis picking sides between the new overlord and the erstwhile ally it was bombing:

To collaborate loyally with our opponents of yesterday in no way signifies in the mind of any man of good sense becoming the enemies of our allies of yesterday. (New York Times)

Men of good sense also knew the Bolsheviks were the real threat to world peace; hence, this Vichy-era newsreel of today’s victim reviewing French troops on the Eastern front:

Brinon knew exactly which side he was on and behaved as such, according to Occupied France: Collaboration and Resistance, 1940-1944:

[O]bsequious, indiscreet and an open admirer of Nazism … his collaboration was ideological, and it exceeded by far the agreements over food, prisoners of war, the demarcation line, and the mass of daily adjustments to the occupation sought by most Vichy officials … [Brinon represented] the Nazi end of the Vichy spectrum.

That made him an easy call for the sternest reprisal liberated France could exact, and he knew it himself: Fernand and Lisette tried to flee for Germany when the western allies began recapturing France in 1944.

What adds poignancy, if perhaps not sympathy, to his fate is the fact that Lisette — Jeanne Rachel Louise Franck, her name had been before he put a ring on her finger — was Jewish, and that fact was not a secret. She spent the occupation years as an official Honorary Aryan, safe from the deportations her husband helped arrange for others.

Lisette was also arrested by the Allies as she fled for Germany in 1944 — and how many Jews can say that? — but was released, and died in 1982. Four years ago, her aged son wrote a soul-searching book about his relationship with his mother and (for Brinon was Lisette’s second marriage) his stepfather, Lisette de Brinon, Ma Mere. There is also a recent biography of Brinon in French (review (also French)).

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1682: Avvakum Petrov, Old Believer

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[audio:Old_Believer_chant.mp3]
(An Old Believer chant, via the Orthodox Church in America)

On this date in 1682, the Orthodox “Old Believer” priest Avvakum was burned at the stake in Pustozyorsk — part of Russia’s brutal crackdown on religious dissenters.

Old Believers rejected — with varying degrees of obstinacy, ranging at its most dramatic to communal self-immolation — liturgical reforms (and a concomitant expansion of central authority) forced by Patriarch Nikon. The conflict between the institutional church and Old Believers resulted in Orthodoxy’s great 17th-century schism, and persecution of the recalcitrants that waxed and waned for generations.

Avvakum, a protopope of one of the principal Moscow cathedrals, was at the forefront of the resistance as the schism opened, refusing to be reconciled with Nikon.

His tart autobiographical account — of miracles, devilry, preaching and persecution — captures an arresting, if obviously partisan, view of the situation.

Later they took the priest Lazar and cut his entire tongue from his throat. Just a bit of blood there was, and then it stopped. And he again spoke even without a tongue. Next they put his right hand on the block and chopped it off at the wrist, and lying there on the ground, of itself the severed hand composed its fingers according to tradition, and it lay that way a long time before the people. Poor thing, it confessed even in death the unchanging sign of the Savior.*

…

Wonderful are the works of the Lord and inexpressible are the designs of the Most High! He suffers punishment, but he has mercy and heals again. But why go on and on ? God’s an old hand at miracles, he brings us from nonexistence to life. And surely he will resurrect all human flesh on the last day in the twinkling of an eye. But who can comprehend this? For God is this: he creates the new and renews the old. Glory be to him in all things!

The “Life of the Archpriest Avvakum” is reprinted in Russian, English and Belgian here, and a slightly different English translation is extensively annotated here.

Old Believers (not excluding those in North America, though this trove of resources is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in Russian Orthodoxy, regardless of locale) still persist, unreconciled to the Orthodox establishment. This respectful photography project documents modern Old Believer life:

* One of the liturgical changes at issue was making the sign of the cross with two fingers (the old way) or three (the new way) — a particularly emblematic symbol of the conflict (notice Avvakum’s two-fingered blessing in the icon above). The dispute had a notable artistic use in Boyarina Morozova, a Vasily Surikov painting of an Old Believer defiantly holding up two fingers as she is hauled to exile.

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1794: Lucile Duplessis and Marie Hebert, friends at the end

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On this date in 1794, two women whose husbands had been deadly enemies in the French Revolution followed them to the guillotine.

The radical Jacques Hebert had been beheaded on March 24; Camille Desmoulins, the acerbic Dantonist journalist who had often savaged Hebert, followed him on April 5. Between the two, Robespierre had destroyed the principle remaining factions to his left and his right, respectively.

In Desmoulins’ last days, a supposed plot involving his wife formed part of the charge against him, and he became frantic that a bride he loved tenderly (he died clutching a lock of her hair) would follow him to the scaffold. It was barely a week later that it came to pass, when Lucile shared a tumbril with an unlikely friend: the widow of Hebert.

In this postcard, Desmoulins (dandling his son) and Lucile are warned of their danger, while Lucile’s doting mother looks on. (Source)

Their fate was nothing to the Revolution, but it remains an affecting personal portrait amid the tempest of factional massacres. Here is their end, sketched by the (markedly anti-Revolutionary) Paris in the Terror:

As Camille Desmoulins had foreseen, his wife soon followed his footsteps to the guillotine … Lucile was arrested immediately after Camille’s execution. It suited the Committee [of Public Safety] to support St. Just’s story of a “dangerous conspiracy in the prisons.” Along with having been seen in the vicinity of the Luxembourg (carrying the baby Horace in her arms in the hope that Camille might catch a glimpse of him),* Lucile had gone to Robespierre’s house and tried to gain admittance in order to plead with the Incorruptible on her husband’s behalf. No man was less accessible to the pleas of wailing women than Robespierre, and his door remained adamantly closed. Such manifestations of despair conveniently lent themselves to St. Just’s contention that revolt was afoot, and Lucile was accordingly arrested.

…

(Robespierre, in fact, had been the chief witness at Camille’s wedding and was actually godfather of little Horace.)

…

Lucile was condemned to death on April 13, along with eighteen other victims. She accepted her sentence with serenity. “In a few hours I shall see my Camille again,” she declared to her judges. “I am therefore less to be pitied than you, for at your death, which will be infamous, you will be haunted by remorse for what you have done.” At the same trial, the widow of Hebert was also condemned. The two women whose husbands had so bitterly hated each other struck up a friendship in the last few days of their life. “You are lucky,” Mme. Hebert said to Lucile as they departed for the scaffold. “Nobody speaks ill of you. There is no shadow upon your character. You are leaving life by the grand staircase.”

…

Upon hearing the news of her daughter’s sentence [Lucile’s mother] sent a frantic letter to Robespierre. “It is not enough for you to have murdered your best friend [Camille],” she cried. “You must have his wife’s blood as well. Your monster Fouquier-Tinville has just ordered Lucile to be taken to the scaffold. In less than two hours’ time she will be dead. If you aren’t a human tiger, if Camille’s blood hasn’t driven you mad, if you are still able to remember the happy evenings you once spent before our fire fondling our Horace, spare an innocent victim. If not — then hurry and take us all, Horace, myself and my other daughter Adele. Hurry and tear us apart with your claws that still drip with Camille’s blood … hurry, hurry so that we can all sleep in the same grave!”

* This particular of strolling outside the prison in hopes of giving the doomed man a glimpse is echoed by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities in the person of Charles Darnay‘s wife — Lucie:

“[T]here is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles can sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get to it — which depends on many uncertainties and incidents — he might see you in the street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can show you.”

…

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds of spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and again in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at this place; and every day on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall.

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1966: Christiaan Soumokil, South Moluccan President

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On this date in 1966, an Indonesian firing squad on the island of Obira (or Obi) shot Chris Soumokil (the link is to his Dutch wikipedia page) for having styled himself the president of the Republic of the South Moluccas.

Soumokil’s fate underscores the many contradictory eddies of nationalism in the post-colonial age, and especially in that “imagined community” par excellence, the scattered archipelago of Indonesia.

Here is the background in outline, from a 2005 anti-terrorism text whose interest in the topic will soon become apparent:

The disintegration of the Dutch East Indies and the rapid dissolution of the federative state was anxiously watched in the Moluccas. … [Moluccans] were a privileged group and had favourable career opportunities … [they] were deeply concerned when Sukarno first proclaimed independence in 1945; indeed, many seemingly chose the side of the Dutch government and hoped for a return to colonial times, because they feared that a Java-dominated Indonesian state would significantly worsen their position. …

When Sukarno, in the spring of 1950, dissolved the state of East Indonesia, of which the Moluccas were a province, a group of Moluccans immediately responded by proclaiming and independent Republic of the South Moluccas (Republik Maluku Selatan) on 24 April. This, of course, was unacceptable for Sukarno. In November 1950, the Indonesian army occupied the island of Ambon, the cultural and political centre of the Moluccas. The RMS government and its sympathizers fled to the island of Ceram, where it started a guerrilla war against the Indonesian government. In the early 1960s it became clear that this struggle was utterly hopeless. In 1962, The Netherlands transferred New Guinea to the Republic of Indonesia, thereby depriving the RMS guerrillas of the safe haven where it [sic] had prepared its actions and found refuge.

Soumokil was captured in December 1962 and imprisoned; he was executed* just a month after the Indonesian government was seized by Suharto, on a programme of putting disorder to the sword.

Although politically moribund, the South Moluccan struggle to which Soumokil is a martyr is far from forgotten. And this is where the story of nationalism takes an unexpected turn.

Moluccan refugees in the Netherlands — a “temporarily” displaced population that became permanent, comprised largely out of ferociously anti-Indonesian former soldiers** among whom the RMS government-in-exile still maintains itself today — carried the memory of this struggle forward, far more so than it persisted in the Moluccas themselves.

For this Moluccan diaspora, already subject to all the strains of migration, the affair was a betrayal by their host country, which had failed to repay their ancestors’ loyalty to Holland during the colonial period by backing their people’s aspirations for independence — and had done this even while placing another colony, Suriname, on precisely the sort of stewardship-to-independence track the RMS had in mind for itself.

Soumokil’s execution (and his widow’s subsequent release to the Netherlands) helped (the link is Dutch) radicalize the next generation of Dutch Moluccans to the extent of carrying out some spectacular terrorist actions.

Though there haven’t been any bombs lately, there remains to this day enough currency in this cause to recommend it in the identity formation of the YouTube generation.

* An account of Soumokil’s last hours given by Soumokil’s widow posted here gives the particulars thus:

On April 11, 1966, Mrs. Soumokil and her son Tommie were given permission to pay a last visit to Mr. Dr. Soumokil from 08.00 AM to 11.30 AM to say good-bye to each other.

On April 12, 1966, at 01.00 AM Mr. Dr. Soumokil had been taken by the Indonesian Military from the condemned cell and transferred by motorboat to the island Obi in the archipelago Pulau Seribu … On April 12, 1966, one minute before 07.00am, Mr. Dr. Soumokil gave his last breath. He had been shot by the Indonesian firing-squad.

** Also generally Christian, vis-a-vis the predominantly Muslim Indonesia.

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1670: Major Thomas Weir, a Puritan with a double life

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On this date in 1670, a 70-year-old upstanding Edinburgher went to the stake for confessing — unbidden — to witchcraft.

The “Wizard of West Bow” had had a distinguished military career and an exactingly pious public life among Edinburgh’s strictest Presbyterians. So it came as something of a surprise when, after being struck by an illness, he up and copped to a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister Jean … and a lifetime of hitherto unknown black arts, powered by a Satanic walking-staff. He was so far from being suspect that town elders at first thought him daft.

Only when Jean backed his story with the sort of details to give vapors to the “Bowhead Saints” neighborhood did things get serious. She especially warned about that staff.

So on this day, the dumbfounded city worthies had to tote one of their own to the area around Edinburgh’s modern Pilrig Street and have him strangled and burnt at the stake. Whatever moved Weir to issue his damning (literally!) admission, he was plainly quite in earnest: when asked to pray at the stake, he shot back, “Let me alone, I will not. I have lived as a beast, and I must die as a beast.” The staff was thrown onto the pyre with him; it was said to burn abnormally slowly.

His sister was hanged shortly thereafter for the same offenses, scandalizing her upstanding neighbors by tearing her clothes off on the way to the scaffold.

For a century, nobody dared live in Weir’s house, which the cremated major — and/or that staff, floating about looking for its owner — supposedly haunted. The house is long torn down, but the tale is natural fodder for any “haunted Edinburgh” tour.

One is struck in such a story by its modernity — perhaps the reason it could speak to a Victorian novelist like Robert Louis Stevenson.

The interpretive framework we begin with for witch hunts is — well, a “witch hunt.” Our own sense of what unjust social persecution is shapes the way we read these long-gone cases, the confessions forced from the victims’ lips. We identify with the “witches”; it is the alien world that ferrets them out and burns them that wants explaining.

Major Weir unnervingly turns the tables on such voyeurs as your correspondent. He steps without warning out of a forgotten mass of long-gone peoples, his confession not merely voluntary but insistent against skepticism — and suddenly we grapple for our bearings not in sociology but in abnormal psychology: here is a man very much of his society who has unexpectedly rejected it, boasts of rejecting it all along, and does so not craving after reconciliation to his people but in order to die (as does his sister) obstinate in that rejection. We can perhaps identify less readily with this individual than with his crestfallen friends.

Whether or not the Weirs really did anything that would count as a crime today — although one is practically forced to agree that at a minimum, the siblings violated a sexual taboo still enforced now — we have a template for this man not in the McCarthy hearings but straight from the evening news: the unassuming neighbor revealed to be a serial killer; the trusted rector who turns out to have been a pedophile.

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1905: Fou Tchou-Li, by a thousand cuts

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On this date in 1905, Fou Tchou-Li suffered the last execution by lingchi in Beijing, for the murder of a Mongolian prince.

Lingchi, or slow slicing, involved the public dismemberment of the victim. As such, it became iconic to westerners as an image of exotic Chinese cruelty — albeit iconic in a mythicized form, the accounts conflicting, undependable, Orientalist. (Many different ones are collected at the Wikipedia page.)

Lingchi is especially notable — apart from fathering the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” in the English lexicology — for its overlap with the era of photography.

Fou Tchou-Li’s death was captured on film, and the images famously captivated Georges Bataille for the expression of seeming ecstasy on the face of the dying (or dead) man.

Bataille was said to meditate daily upon the image below in particular — “I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”

Agony and ecstasy? A sequence of images, strong stuff in spite of their low quality, describing Fou Tchou-Li’s execution can be viewed here. Notice, however, that it’s not the one pictured here — the scholar who maintains this page claims the man’s identity became confused by western interlocutors. The different, unnamed man who as “Fou Tchou-Li” riveted Bataille is pictured here.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explained the mystical nexus of pleasure and pain Fou Tchou-Li’s torture suggested to the French theorist, aptly comparing it to graphic but pre-photographic exaltations of torture in the western artistic tradition, such as Saint Sebastian:

To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge — a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. … Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure in the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation — a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility.

It’s no idle point to say that all this reads quite a lot into a single frame that may not be all that representative of the moment, though that wouldn’t necessarily diminish Bataille’s gist. More, these are western interpretations of — projections upon — an image marked as fundamentally outside in a tableau irresistibly blending the colonizer and the colonized.

The execution was ordered in the last days of the Qing Dynasty, which had long been substantially beholden to European states, especially the British; the prisoner was apparently administered opium to numb the pain, the very product Britain had gone to war to force China to accept.

Taiwanese video artist Chen Chieh-jen interpreted the photography that so captivated Bataille, and its colonial context, in Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (review).

Two weeks after this date, China abolished the punishment for good.

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1975: Eight South Korean pro-democracy activists

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At dawn on this date in 1975, the South Korean dictatorship hanged eight pro-democracy activists, the day after the Korean Supreme Court had approved their spurious conviction as agents of the fictitious “People’s Revolutionary Party”.

The eight, Woo Hong-seon, Song Sang-jin, Seo Do-won, Ha Jae-wan, Lee Su-byeong, Kim Yong-won, Doh Ye-jong and Yeo Jeong-nam, were tortured by the Korean CIA into admitting affiliation with this organization supposedly collaborating with the Communist North.

They were among numerous opponents of South Korean strongman Park Chung-hee rounded up for protesting against the legal codification of outright dictatorship in the early 1970’s.

Early last year, a South Korean court officially ruled that they had been wrongly executed, and awarded their surviving family members $26 million.

According to the worldwide anti-death penalty organization Hands Off Cain, the death penalty remains on the books in South Korea but has not been employed for over a decade.

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1857: Mangal Pandey, rebellious sepoy

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On this date in 1857, ten days before the scheduled date for his execution, Mangal Pandey was hanged at Barrackpore, India, for mutiny against his British officers — a death sentence at the intersection of technology, faith and empire that would prefigure India’s first large-scale rebellion against English authority.

For a man of whom much is written and ponderous historical weight is imputed, Mangal Pandey is a mysterious character. Little is known of his life save the very end of it; its significance, as is so often the case, derives from the larger history that preceded and followed it on the subcontinent.

The march of industry was driving better and better ways to kill people, and to this end the British were upgrading old smoothbore firearms with more accurate rifled weapons. Early in 1857, Indian forces got the Pattern 1853 Enfield.

Soldiers of the day loaded their guns by biting open a paper cartridge, which Indian troops had been doing for years. But the Enfield cartridge, coated with a waterproofing grease, smelled or tasted different to many — and rumors spread that it was manufactured with pork lard (which would be an affront to Muslims) or beef tallow (which would be an affront to Hindus).

Controversially, this book says Pandey “is part of that imagination of historians. He had no notion of patriotism or even of India.”

The British didn’t take seriously the potential implications of this postulate among a population already resentful of aggressive Christian proselytizing. When a general petitioned for the expediency of switching back to the old cartridge paper, he got a characteristic response:

“Concessions made to the murmurs and threats of an ignorant race only increase their perversity and folly.”

On March 29, Pandey — possibly high — went on a protracted rampage on the parade grounds. The Indian soldiery resisted orders to restrain him, although it also did not answer Pandey’s incitement to mutiny, leaving the sepoy to a solitary performance in which he fought off in melee two British officers. Only the arrival of a general — the one who had wanted to replace the cartridges — mastered the situation.

The verdict was a foregone conclusion, but the criminality of Pandey’s outburst from the standpoint of the British military is a much easier matter to establish than the chain of events elevating him into national hero. Pandey lived his life forward, but his noteworthiness derives from retrospection.

A month after he hanged, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 broke out, an event (debatably) construed as an Indian War of Independence, dramatically recontextualizing the Barrackpore hanging. His exhortations about the cartridges, about “our religion”, suggest him as a like-minded martyr, but there is almost nothing to firmly establish why he did what he did. He even declined to defend himself at trial.

None of this undermines his place in India’s national pantheon, and perhaps Pandey’s own blank backstory facilitate his mythological adoption. A 2005 Indian film, Mangal Pandey: The Rising, recently placed it on the silver screen, drawing criticism both for naive Indian nationalism and for insufficient reverence for the title character.

Its rendition of Pandey’s conviction and hanging are here:

Update: BBC radio’s In Our Times takes on the 1857 mutiny.

* A weapon widely used by both sides in the U.S. Civil War.

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2007: Du’a Khalil Aswad, honor killing victim

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On or about this date one year ago, a 17-year-old Kurdish Yazidi (alternatively, Yezidi) girl was stoned to death by her own community for falling in love with a Muslim boy.

Details on exactly how Du’a Khalil Aswad came to her end are slightly unclear: whether or not she converted to Islam, for instance, and whether she was lured to her death or simply taken by force.

What is blood-chillingly plain is the end itself — a mob “honor killing,” carried out publicly by (at least in part) men of her family, and anachronistically filmed with cell phones and therefore soon to rocket around the Internet. The existence of this video is what makes this incident notable to the wider world.

Caution: This video contains graphic footage. We have issued this warning before in these pages, but what follows here is of a different character: this is a powerless child, communally beaten to death while she pleads for help, recorded from a couple meters’ distance by someone (one of many, one can see) who felt filming was the most pressing possible occupation of his time at this moment. It’s exceedingly violent, exceedingly personal and exceedingly recent. Even at that, this is only an excerpt of a half-hour ordeal.

The fact that this video is hosted by Spiked Humor and comes with the associated teaser link adds an unwanted layer of perversity, but YouTube has repeatedly censored it; it takes some digging (this clip turned up here; a longer one can be downloaded here) to find any extended clip.

So, to repeat: This video contains extraordinarily graphic footage.

This is, to be sure, borderline as an execution — although it is one community’s ritual slaying in judgment, which is an uncomfortably close definition. Whatever one calls it, it apparently prompted a retaliatory massacre of Yazidis by Sunni gunmen,* and some months later, the deadliest suicide bombing of the American occupation.

It has also prompted at least some agitation for addressing the continued existence of honor killings especially in northern Iraq. Arrests for carrying out this killing were reported last spring, but I have been unable to find any subsequent report indicating a trial, conviction, acquittal or release.

** Although the existence of that context for the latter massacre was immediately reported, the video itself didn’t reach a worldwide audience until some days afterwards.

Update: Honor killing activists remember Aswad on the anniversary of her death here.

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