Category Archives: 21st Century

2013: Orelesitse Thokamolelo, bad in-law

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Orelesitse Thokamolelo caught six death sentences in Botswana for slaughtering six family members, and on this date in 2013 he suffered the first of them at Gaborone Central Prison.

It all started on a nice visit he paid to his brother Landane Thokamolelo.

The Botswana Gazette reported (May 29, 2013) that “on the second day of his visit, Thokamolelo woke up and demanded to cook food where upon [sic] his brother’s wife and mother-in-law refused.” Whether this was the women’s exacting spirit of hospitality or their fear for the state of the kitchen, their houseguest didn’t appreciate the denial. In the ensuing argument, he “took a knobkerrie and beat his brother’s mother-in-law and his brother’s wife to death.” In for a penny, in for a pound, Thokamolelo then turned the bloodied club on the wife’s four-month-old child.

The brother during all this was out collecting firewood with two other children, and when they returned later that day, Thokamolelo served them the same way, albeit with fresh bludgeons: the brother he overpowered and battered to death with a hammer, after which he pursued the fleeing children into the bush and “killed them with a log.” The doggedness and calculation implied in murdering the second trio must have weighed heavily against Thokamolelo’s attorney’s attempt to float an insanity argument. Not even reefer drives a man that crazy: “After anxious inquiring of mind of this matter, I also find no misdirection by the trial court in considering the effect of dagga taken by the appellant and giving it weight,” an appellate judge ruled in April 2013.

Botswana is not a particularly frequent user of the death penalty, with a single-digit death row and hangings typically separated by several years. (Its most recent was Patrick Gabaankanye, just a few days ago as of this writing.) That small sample, however, holds some uncommonly interesting cases — such as Mariette Bosch and Modise Mokwadi Fly.

Part of the Themed Set: The 2010s.

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2011: Mehdi Farahj, photographed by Ebrahim Noroozi

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Mehdi Farahj was hanged in Qazvin on this date in 2011 for a rape-murder spree that claimed five women’s lives.

Iranian photographer Ebrahim Noroozi shot scenes of this hanging as part of a stunning black-and-white series on public executions in Iran.

Noroozi gave an interview explaining his motivation and process — and allowing that the executions he attends “disgust me.”

Part of the Themed Set: The 2010s.

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2004: Nick Berg, by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

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Twenty-six-year-old American communications contractor Nick Berg was beheaded a hostage in Iraq on this date in 2004 — allegedly by the personal hand of Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

A veteran of the mujahideen who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Zarqawi spent most of the 1990s in a Jordanian prison but was amnestied just in time to rejoin militant Islam before it became a post-9/11 boom industry.

Zarqawi’s Jordanian terrorist group Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, founded in 1999, transitioned with the American invasion of Iraq into the Al-Qaeda franchise in that country, a feared prosecutor of the sectarian civil war there, and the lineal forbear of the present-day Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL).

It also became a lusty early adopter of the emerging beheading-video genre: an ancient penalty perfectly adapted for the digital age.

This ferocious group was a severe mismatch for Berg, a Pennsylvanian freelance radio tower repairman (and pertinently, a Jew) who set up his Prometheus Methods Tower Service in the northern city of Mosul* in the months following the 2003 U.S. invasion. This was also around the time that American occupation forces’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib came to light — a powerful excuse for blood vengeance.

Berg vanished from Baghdad in April 2004, and was not seen in public again until the whole world saw him: the unwilling feature of a May 11 video titled Sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel with his hands and promises Bush more.

“We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls,” a voice says. “You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins … slaughtered in this way.”

Warning: Mature Content. This is both a political document of our time, and a horrifying snuff film. Notice that Berg appears in an orange jumpsuit, a seeming allusion to Muslim prisoners being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.

Twenty-five months later to the day, Zarqawi was assassinated by a U.S. Air Force bombing.

* As of this writing, Mosul is occupied by Zarqawi’s creation, the Islamic State.

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

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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.

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2015: Liu Han, former tycoon

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One year ago today, Chinese billionaire Liu Han was executed in Hubei province, along with his younger brother Liu Wei and thee other associates.

One of the prime catches in the anti-corruption hunt of current president Xi Jinping, Liu was a mining oligarch whose personal fortune was once valued at $6.4 billion.

He was also allegedly “an organized crime boss that no one dared provoke”. He was arrested early in 2014 for embezzlement, gun-running, and orchestrating a hit on a rival crime lord.

Liu’s fall was widely perceived as a strike against his close ally, the powerful former security minister Zhou Yongkang. After months — years even — of rumors about his impending fate, Zhou was arrested for corruption in December 2014; he has since been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

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2016: Brandon Astor Jones

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Forty-six minutes after midnight this morning, the U.S. state of Georgia executed its oldest death row inmate, Brandon Astor Jones.

Jones was a prolific penpal correspondent who had won a worldwide following as he fought his death sentence over half a lifetime.

His accomplice Van Roosevelt Solomon was electrocuted all the way back in 1985 for the same convenience store robbery-murder;* as Liliana Segura recently noted in The Intercept, Jones’s case is heavy with the arbitrariness of capital cases — not only that Jones outlived Solomon by three decades, but also that in that span many other Georgians have committed homicides equal to his in tragic banality, served a term of years for it, and been released. It needs hardly even be said that Jones, like 54 of the other 60 people executed by Georgia since the 1970s, had a white victim: that’s a disparity that courts have washed their hands of even though it was one of the constitutional concerns that led a former incarnation of the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate death penalty statutes in 1972.

While Jones’s death is headline news, his case dates to the earliest years of what is dignified the “modern” death penalty period and as such might more closely resemble the preceding era than the one we inhabit today.

It’s almost a time capsule of the jurisprudence — and sociology — touching capital punishment, even including Jones’s unluckily-timed appeal victory that led to a new sentencing hearing during the gung-ho-to-execute 1990s. Even if the distance of time is extreme, more typical death penalty lags of 8, 10, 15 years mean that most present-day executions are ripples of receding public policy sensibilities — “zombie cases” in the words of Southern Center for Human Rights director Stephen Bright. People like Brandon Jones “almost certainly would not be sentenced to death today,” when prosecutors, judges, and juries all show growing reluctance to don the black cap. But it’s a very different story for those is already tangled in the coils of the system.

* A policeman happened to be arriving right to the same store on a coincidental errand when the crime went down, so the culprits were arrested before they made it off the parking lot.

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2015: Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, filmed

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Last year on this date, Saudi Arabia’s execution wave consumed a Burmese woman named Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim.

Condemned for the murder and sexual abuse of her seven-year-old stepdaughter, Basim went to her public beheading protesting her innocence and resisting in whatever way she could — which we know, because a cell phone recording of the execution attained worldwide dissemination. In it, the black-shrouded condemned shrieks over and over, “I did not kill! This is unjust!” She denounces her executioners, invokes the Shahada … until her throat is horrifically emptied of its last protest by the blade.

Warning: This is the on-camera death of a human being from just a few meters’ distance, obtained via Liveleak. It’s awful.

Thanks to the outrage this video spawned, a “human rights organization” underwritten by the Saudi government demanded the arrest of the person who recorded the video … which did indeed occur.

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2006: Qiu Xinghua, temple fury

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On this date in 2006, the People’s Republic of China executed a gentleman by the name of Qiu Xinghua.

Qiu’s offense, at bottom, was one of anger management: believing the abbot at a mountain temple in the interior province of Shaanxi was making time with his wife, Qiu went on a homicidal rampage at said temple where he

cut out the abbot’s eyes, heart and lungs and fried them in a wok. He had used the victims’ blood to write “Deserved to die” on the temple wall.

“The victims” comprised nine other people besides the abbot, plus another one killed while on the run from the law for five weeks after his temple frenzy. (He also torched the temple.)

The enormity of the crime, and the attempts by Qiu’s team to raise doubts about his sanity, attracted wide public attention in China.

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2013: Jang Sung-taek, North Korean purgee

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On this date in 2013, according to North Korea’s state news organ, Kim Jong-un‘s uncle was sentenced to death and directly executed.

Days earlier, Jang Sung-taek (alternatively, Song-taek, Sung-thaek, and various similar transliterations) had suffered an extremely visible fall when, in a Saddam-like twist, he was arrested on live television in the midst of a politburo meeting.


Image from KCTV (North Korea) shows Jang Sung-taek being arrested during a politburo meeting in Pyongyang.

Even so, the severity of his treatment was a surprise given his family tie to the supreme leader (he was the husband of Kim Jong-il‘s sister).

Long one of the secretive state’s top officials — his prestige recovered from two previous falls from favor in the late 1980s and early 2000s — Jang was among the officials involved in the transfer of power from the late Kim Jong-il to the young dictator Kim Jong-un. It is uncertain exactly what brought about his destruction; speculation ran to differing philosophies of economic development and/or raw power rivalry, little clarified by a government statement denouncing him as “despicable human scum … worse than a dog” for his “thrice-cursed acts of treachery” and “decadent capitalist lifestyle.”

Jang was executed by shooting: machine gun fire in the “normal” version, or the more spectacular novelty of anti-aircraft fire by some accounts. (Reports to the effect that Jang was executed by being fed to a pack of wild dogs can still be found, but this story was fabricated by a satirist and its subsequent circulation cautions against a propensity to give credence to every lurid rumor about North Korea.)

Jang’s fall reportedly also brought about the execution of “all relatives” and hundreds of officials who were considered members of his faction.

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2009: Hu Minghua and Su Binde, child abductors

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China on this date in 2009 executed two men for trafficking kidnapped children.

“The crimes of children trafficking are on the rise,” said a spokesman for the Supreme People’s Court. “Children trafficking gangs now have clearer division of work and more children of migrant workers have been abducted.”

Kidnapping has been a major problem in China for many years, one which authorities have fought in vain with ever-strengthened legal sanctions. Needless to say the executions marked this date hardly abated the trend.

Up to 70,000 children are thought to disappear by abduction in China every year — particularly boys, for whom there is a lucrative market.

The men executed Nov. 26, 2009 seem to have emerged right from this unfortunate suq: 55-year-old 55-year-old Hu Minghua of Yunan Province was condemned for trafficking seven different children, plus heroin besides; 27-year-old Su Binde of Henan Province had six child abductions to his name over the course of just 10 months. (Su also led an armed robbery gang in Liuyuan Township that killed at least one man.)

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