2009: Abdullah Fareivar, by the rope instead of the stone

According to an AFP report, 50-year-old music teacher Abdullah Fareivar was hanged on this date in 2009 for “illicit relations” with a 17-year-old girl in the city of Sari.

Fareivar had been sentenced to the more dramatic adulterers’ death of stoning — notwithstanding his family’s insistence that he had entered into a legal “contract marriage” with the full knowledge of his wife. The sentence apparently was moderated to the noose.

Though scholars continue to believe that stoning remains available in Iran for crimes of sexual impropriety, the Iranian elite has made a great show over the past decade or so of disclaiming the practice. Such a sentence does not appear to have been enforced since the first decade of the 21st century.

On this day..