In 2005, Saber Sharbati, a 15-year-old Iranian teenager much like any other, was allegedly drawn into an altercation with a taxi driver. The driver, Sharbati says, attacked him with a steering wheel lock, and in the course of defending himself he inflicted blows that resulted in the driver's death. Though he was only 15 at the time, a provincial criminal court convicted him of first degree murder. Of the five judge panel, two dissenting judges ruled against the execution, arguing that he was “not of mature mind.” In the eight years that have passed since, Sharbati has sat on death row awaiting execution. His case has made its rounds through Iran's judicial system, his execution was overturned and then later re-instated.
The age of maturity is ambiguously defined in the Iranian legal system, with the county's civil and criminal codes in general agreement that children should not bear punishment, but with wide discrepancies as to how and when “maturity” should be determined. A handful of cases like Sharbati's have attracted widespread attention inside Iran in recent years, and inspiring civic activism campaigns aimed at ending child executions.
The director Amin Meeri recently staged a play in Tehran about Sharbati's case, “The Blue Feeling of Death” (Ehsaas-e Aabiy-e Marg), with the aim of raising the 500 million tomans in blood money demanded by the victim's family (Sharbati family had not been able to raise the funds, which would have stayed his execution).On Saturday, the play's author, Sajjad Afsharian, thanked all those who had attended the play on its Facebook page, and announced that the full amount had been raised, along with an excess that “we will spend on the next young person.”
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