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Nigeria Acquits Woman Sentenced to
Stoning Death
By Todd Pitman
KATSINA, Nigeria (Sept. 25) - An Islamic appeals
court Thursday threw out the case of a Nigerian woman sentenced
to death by stoning for committing adultery, a case that
sharpened the divide between Muslims and Christians in Africa's
most populous country.
Amina Lawal would have been the first woman stoned to death
since 12 northern states began adopting strict Islamic law, or
Shariah, in 1999. Four of five judges on the court voted to
overturn the verdict, citing procedural errors in her original
trial.
Wrapped in a light orange veil, her eyes downcast, Lawal
cradled her nearly 2-year-old daughter as the court announced
its decision. Police and lawyers hustled her away afterward. ''It's a victory for law. It's a victory for justice,'' said
defense attorney Hauwa Ibrahim. ''And it's a victory for what we
stand for - dignity and fundamental human rights.''
An Islamic court first convicted Lawal, 32, in March 2002
after the birth of her daughter two years after she divorced her
husband. Judges rejected Lawal's first appeal five months later. Prosecutors, who argued Lawal's child was living proof she
committed adultery, said they were satisfied with the verdict
but had 30 days to appeal. The verdict drew international condemnation. The government
of President Olusegun Obasanjo called for Lawal's life to be
spared, and Brazil offered her asylum.
The Islamic appeals panel ruled the conviction couldn't stand
because Lawal wasn't given enough time to understand the charges
against her; only one judge, instead of the required three,
presided at her trial; and she was not caught in the act of sex
out of wedlock. In the sole dissenting opinion, Judge Sule Sada said Lawal
had confessed to the crime and the conviction should stand. But
the defense had argued that the court should reject Lawal's
confession because no lawyers were present when she made it.
The introduction of strict Islamic law in a dozen northern
states has triggered deadly clashes between Christians and
Muslims. Five people, including Lawal, have been sentenced to
death by stoning. Three have had their convictions overturned. ''We think the death penalty for adultery is contrary to the
Nigerian constitution,'' said Francois Cantier, a lawyer with
French group Avocats Sans Frontieres, or Lawyers Without
Borders, who was advising the defense. ''We think that death by
stoning is contrary to international treaties against torture
which Nigeria has ratified. We think that death by stoning is
degrading human treatment.''
Also under Shariah, one man has been hanged for killing a
woman and her two children and Muslim authorities have amputated
the hands of three people for stealing. Many Muslims in the predominantly Islamic north have welcomed
Shariah, saying it's a key part of their religion and
discourages crime. Lead defense lawyer Aliyu Musa Yawuri said Lawal - a poor,
uneducated woman from a rural family - didn't understand the
charges against her at the time.
Lawal has identified her alleged sexual partner, Yahaya
Mohammed, and said he promised to marry her. Mohammed, who would
also have faced death by stoning denied any wrongdoing and was
acquitted for lack of evidence.
Lawal is the second Nigerian woman to be condemned to
death for having sex out of wedlock under Islamic law. The
first, Safiya Hussaini, had her sentence overturned on appeal in
March - the same time that Lawal was convicted.
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Nigerian
President Olusegun Obasanjo
Assures the
World: Nigerians
Won't Be
Stoned for Adultery
(Tuesday, October, 2002) |
|
LAGOS (Reuters) - gave assurances on
Tuesday that the country's higher appeal courts would quash the
death-by-stoning sentences for adultery passed by Islamic
courts. Obasanjo said in a radio and television
broadcast to mark Nigeria's 42nd independence anniversary that a
31-year-old mother, Amina Lawal Kurami, and a couple condemned
to death by Muslim courts can launch appeals at the Supreme
Court where they will be guaranteed justice.
"We have never entertained doubts that
whatever verdict a lower court may give, the appellate courts
will ensure that justice is done," he said. "We fully
understand the concerns of Nigerians and friends of Nigeria, but
we cannot imagine or envision a Nigerian being stoned to
death," Obasanjo said. "It has never happened. And may
it never happen."
|
 |
Stoning as punishment for sex crimes had
drawn a barrage of international criticism since August when a
sharia Court of Appeals in the northern state of Katsina
confirmed the death sentence on Kurami.
Obasanjo's assurance came a week after former
U.S. President Bill Clinton and Australian Prime Minister John
Howard joined the international pressure on Nigeria to overturn
the death verdict on Kurami.
Kurami was condemned to death in March by a
lower court in Katsina, which like more than a dozen others in
northern Nigeria has adopted the strict Islamic sharia law. She
was granted a two-year reprieve to wean her daughter. now nine
months old, and would not be stoned until 2004. Her lawyers said
they have appealed to a higher court. |
Kurami is the second woman to be sentenced to
death for adultery since 2000, when sharia law was first adopted
in Nigeria. In March, an appeals court in northwestern Sokoto
state quashed a similar sentence on Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu
after worldwide appeals for clemency. She was made an honorary
citizen of Rome in September.
In August, another Islamic court in central
Niger state sentenced a pregnant woman and her lover to be
stoned to death after convicting them of adultery. The adoption
of sharia law has polarised Nigeria, Africa's most populous
country, whose population of more than 120 million is almost
evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. More than 3,000
people have died in religious clashes in the past two years in
the traditionally secular west African nation.
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* * *
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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update 20
January 2012
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