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IRAN — An Iranian man who survived an execution by hanging may have to face a second round, judges said.
Workers at the morgue were surprised to find Alireza M. still breathing when his family came to pick him up the day after he was executed for possessing a kilo of crystal meth, according to The Guardian. The 37-year-old had been declared dead by a doctor after hanging for 12 minutes by a rope suspended on a crane.
His family, including two daughters, were delighted at the discovery, but Iran's officials were less than pleased.
"The sentence is approved and the sentence is death, so we will follow through with the execution order again," Mohammad Erfan, the judge who sentenced Alireza, told Iran's state-run newspaper Jam-e-Jam.
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Iranian law requires those facing the death penalty to be conscious and relatively healthy when their sentence is carried out, so Alireza is currently recovering at a hospital, according to The Guardian.
Human Rights advocates urged Iran not to make him hang a second time.
“The horrific prospect of this man facing a second hanging, after having gone through the whole ordeal already once, merely underlines the cruelty and inhumanity of the death penalty,” said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, in a press release Thursday.
This is probably the first time Iran has ordered a hanging to be carried out for the same person twice, according to the New York Times. Amnesty International reported Iran has hung 508 people so far in 2013. The majority of the hangings were for crimes related to smuggling or possessing drugs.
Luther said it is natural for Iranian authorities to want to tackle problems related to drug trafficking, but the death penalty is not the answer.
“Carrying out a second execution on a man who somehow managed to survive 12 minutes of hanging — who was certified as dead and whose body was about to be turned over to his family — is simply ghastly. It betrays a basic lack of humanity that sadly underpins much of Iran’s justice system,” he said.
