This year, the Islamic Republic of Iran has already executed at least 841 of its citizens.
Many were political dissidents, arrested during the waves of protest in recent years or accused of links to proscribed groups. They were often tortured to extract false confessions and were sometimes hanged in the public square.

Knowing that hundreds more Iranians risk the same death, with some sentences having already been upheld at the last instance (e.g. for a trade unionist, a Kurdish activist and a blasphemer), the Association of Psychiatrists addressed a letter to the head of the judiciary in the last days of August.
‘Relying to its scientific and professional duty to preserve and promote the mental health of society’, the Association expressed ‘its grave concern about this matter’.

The contents of the letter

The debate points listed by the psychiatrists were:

• The public execution of sentences ‘has no proven and lasting effect on reducing crime’; on the contrary, it can cause ‘a potential increase in violence. According to some studies, after executions the murder rate in the localities concerned has temporarily increased‘;

• Especially in children who witness the killing, ‘being a direct witness to such scenes can cause serious psychological damage, including post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the onset of unconscious imitative attitudes’.
  
  
• “Displaying violence in public spaces can erode citizens’ trust in government institutions and create a sense of collective humiliation”;
  
  
• All the more so in a technological context in which ‘the harm of such actions is not limited to the individuals present at the time, but also includes those watching the recorded images’.
  

A criticism in accordance with Islamic law

On paper, therefore, the letter merely listed the ‘psychic and social damages’ caused by spectacular public executions, without going into a frontal critique of the death penalty that would have been unthinkable under the current regime.

Moreover, from the perspective of Islamic law, it is unclear whether it is appropriate to kill those sentenced to death in public. The Qur’an recommends ‘that a portion of the believers act as witnesses’ for the punishment of crimes such as adultery (24:2): however, only some legal schools have seen an allusion to public executions in this.

As for the death penalty itself it’s different. Executions of ‘those who have waged war against God and his Messenger or sowed corruption in the earth’ are explicitly prescribed in the Book (5:33). In this case the jurist must make an interpretative effort to spare the penalty, not to inflict it.

The Association of Psychiatrists had already reasoned in such way two years ago, when it took a stand against the attempt to categorise headscarf refusal as a mental disorder and to open ‘headscarf clinics’ in which to intern women who did not want to wear it.
On that occasion, psychiatrists had been careful not to argue that the veil requirement itself was unjust. They had, however, argued that medicalising the veil refusal was unfounded and counterproductive.

In that circumstance, too, they had therefore used their sectional expertise on mental health to question not an explicit Qur’anic precept (the covering of hair) but a contingent decision by the Iranian authorities on how to treat transgressors (clinical care).

However, the question remains: can one really challenge the form without also challenging the substance?

Is criticism of public executions really not criticism of the death penalty itself?

Echoes of Beccaria

It is impossible not to notice the striking similarities between the letter of the Iranian psychiatrists and some of the famous pages in which Cesare Beccaria, in 1764, contested the death penalty, as part of a broader rethinking of the power relations between state and subject.

In the text of Crimes and penalties, in fact, there is no distinction of levels between the killing itself and its public visibility.
Debate points similar to those of Iranian psychiatrists were employed by the Milanese jurist to delegitimise capital punishment itself, not just its spectacularisation in the public square.

The reason is that, according to Beccaria, penalty does not serve to punish crimes but to prevent crimes.
The point of view he takes, therefore, is that of a potential criminal who has to decide whether to commit the crime or not: which laws would be more effective in convincing him to give up?

Blood calls blood

Certainly not the death penalty, whether public or secret.
In fact, Beccaria, like the Iranian psychiatrists, observed that ‘The countries and times with the most atrocious tortures were also those of the bloodiest and most inhuman deeds, since the same spirit of ferocity that guided the hand of the legislator governed that of the parricide and the assassin’.

As to why, he gave several explanations. He wrote, for instance, that ‘to the extent that the tortures become more cruel, human spirits, which like fluids always level themselves with the objects that surround them, become hardened’.

He suggested that ‘the very atrocity of punishment makes one dare all the more to dodge it ‘: ‘it makes one commit more crimes to escape the punishment of the first‘.

But above all, he noted that ‘our soul resists violence and extreme but transitory pain more than time and incessant boredom‘, such as that of prison or forced labour, because ‘it can, as it were, condense all of itself for a moment to reject the former’, while ‘its vigorous elasticity is not sufficient to resist the long and repeated action of the latter’.

Gallows fuels heroic narratives

Putting himself in the shoes of a thief about to commit a robbery, Beccaria imagined how excited he would feel as an avenger of the wrongs done by the powerful to the weak: ‘Let us break these bonds, fatal to the majority and useful to a few indolent tyrants, let us attack injustice at its source!’.

The awareness that everything would end with the death penalty would be an incentive, not a disincentive: ‘I will return to my state of natural independence, I will live free and happy for some time with the fruits of my courage. The day of sorrow and repentance may come, but it will be brief this time, and I will have one day of hardship for many years of freedom and pleasures’.

Now, if even a thief would adopt this heroic narrative about his deeds, how much more legitimately does a political opponent, an apostate of Islam or a trade unionist under an oppressive regime?

Distrust in institutions

Putting himself instead in the shoes of ordinary people, Beccaria observed that ‘the death penalty becomes a spectacle for most and an object of compassion mixed with indignation for some: both occupy the spectators’ souls more than the salutary terror that the law purports to inspire’.
So it makes many indifferent, some sympathising with the criminals and only very few frightened.
How is it, Beccaria wonders, that soldiers who defend the state against external dangers are pitied by the people, while the executioner who eliminates internal enemies is despised?

Capital punishment accustoms people to the belief that ‘laws are but the pretexts of force’, and thus weakens, not strengthens, authority.
On the other hand, Beccaria’s book, at least officially, served to convince rulers to reform the law in their own interest. And in this, too, it shows striking similarities with the psychiatrists’ appeal to the Islamic Republic.

Let us remember who we are

Of course, the deep reason Beccaria criticised bloody punishments was not their futility but their injustice, in light of the all-Western contractualist conception he had of the state. And it is on this ground that an Iranian, at least for now, cannot follow him.

According to contractualism, the sovereign’s power derives from the surrender of small portions of freedom by his subjects. Well, what man would ever cede to another man the freedom to take his life?

Knowing that such revolutionary idea of the relationship between rulers and ruled is a conquest of our civilisation and a cornerstone of our identity, it is even more saddening to see so many nostalgics of the death penalty around Italy.
Nostalgics who regret precisely the death penalty’s vengeful and exemplary value, bypassing in this respect even the psychiatrists of Iran, who at least ask for it to be applied discreetly and out of sight.

It is sad that in the country of Beccaria, and under a democracy, there are those who are more fond of capital punishment than people in Iran under the ayatollahs’ regime.

We should more often remind ourselves of who we are.