Unfair trial, death sentence for a taxi driver
18-October-2020
Category: executions
Breathing in Confinement: A taxi driver has been sentenced to death only for having with him the cell phone of a murder victim.
According to the Rokna news agency, on January 31, 2017, the body of a 30-year-old man named Mohammad, was discovered on a roadside in Shahriar. During the investigation, the police found that the victim’s cell phone was missing. Five months later, however, police detected that the victim’s mobile phone was switched on, and finally, a 37-year-old taxi driver named Aziz was arrested. However, Aziz pleads that he didn’t know the victim and that he found the cell phone in his car. He also said that after several months of not hearing from the owner, he gave the cell phone to his wife, who had been asking for a cell phone for a long time, while Aziz could not afford it.
In response to the court judges who asked him: “how at the time of the murder, your cell phone and that of the victim, was networked in the same area?”, Aziz said: “I probably was carrying passengers in the same area where Mohammad was killed.”
According to the defendant’s lawyer, with the exception of this mobile phone, there is no other evidence showing that the defendant was involved in Mohammad’s murder. For the judges of Branch 10 of the Criminal Court in Tehran Province, however, this evidence was enough for issuing a death sentence for the accused.
According to this report, the verdict was overturned by the Supreme Court and the case was referred to a court of equal rank, for retrial.
And if in issuing a death sentence, the judges of the court of equal rank, be as generous as the judges of the branch 10 of the criminal court in a Tehran, then the 37-year-old Aziz, will soon join the long list of the victims of the gallows in the Islamic Republic.