On Monday, Dec. 12, agents of the theocratic dictatorship which has ruled Iran for 43 years executed a young man in public by hoisting him with a crane with a noose around his neck, his hands and feet bound, a hood pulled over his head.

One day later, on Tuesday, Dec. 13, Oregon’s Democratic outgoing Gov. Kate Brown commuted the sentences of all 17 people on death row, substituting life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The timing of the events was coincidental but they dramatically underline the difference between official barbarism and humaneness. The Iranian regime, which seized power after sustained, mass civil protest, overthrew the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, on Feb. 11, 1979, invoked the name of God as justification for the macabre killing of Majid Reza Rahnavard, the second person executed in the ongoing protests over the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year woman who was taken into custody by the “morality police” for not wearing her head scarf in the prescribed manner.

In the protests, which are reminiscent of the demonstrations which ousted Pahlavi and which are not the first against the tyrannical rule of the mullahs who replaced him, around a dozen others have been sentenced to death in the usual closed-door hearings, nearly 500 have been killed and more than 18,200 detained, the Associated Press reported, citing Human Rights Activists, a group monitoring the protests.

It is a cautionary tale at a time when some in the United States want to replace democracy with a Biblical-based regime, including those leaders who proclaim themselves as divinely inspired, such as Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Iranian rulers invoke religion as their excuse for executing protesters, whom they charge with “moharebeh,” a Farsi word which means “waging war against God.”

A Revolutionary Court convicted Rahnavard of killing two members of a paramilitary force deployed against the protesters. A banner displayed over his body quoted a Qur’anic verse that translates into: “Indeed the requital of those who wage war against Allah and His Apostle and try to cause corruption on the earth, is that they shall be slain or crucified, or shall have their hands and feet cut off from opposite sides, or be banished from the land.”

But a panel of United Nations Human Rights Commission experts declared in a statement, “We urge Iranian authorities to stop using the death penalty as a tool to squash protests and reiterate our call to immediately release all protesters who have been arbitrarily deprived of their liberty for the sole reason of exercising their legitimate rights to freedom of opinion and expression, association and peaceful assembly and for their actions to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms through peaceful means.”

The regime obviously executes citizens to discourage opposition and Iran is “one of the world’s top executioners,” the AP reported. More than 500 people have been executed so far this year alone, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights. Estimates put the number of executions in 1988 at between 2,800 and 5,000, Human Rights Watch reported. Oregon’s Gov. Brown’s commutations, coming when they did, offer a stark contrast in dealing with capital punishment. In her statement, she explained that she has “long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life and the state should not be in the business of executing people – even if a terrible crime placed them in prison.” In fact, although Oregon, like 26 other states, has not abolished the death penalty, it has not executed anyone since 1997 and Brown, who was ineligible for re-election, is the latest governor to impose a moratorium.

Brown’s successor, Tina Kotek, elected in November, will continue the trend, telling Oregon Public Broadcasting during the campaign that she will “continue the current moratorium,” adding, “I am personally opposed to the death penalty because of my religious beliefs.” Two defeated candidates had pledged to reverse that position.

That attitude is not shared by all Americans, with 28 states still having the death penalty in their statutes, but 23 others do not, starting with Wisconsin in 1853; Colorado was the latest to abolish it, in 2020, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Florida is among the death-penalty states, carrying out its first execution in 1827. Counties conducted judicial killings until 1923, when the state took over and switched from hanging to electrocution. Following three botched executions by that method, the state changed to poisoning – lethal injections – in the 1990s.

Florida now has 323 death row inmates, the second highest after California with 690, and offers a choice between electrocution and lethal injection. Some 35 percent of Floridians support capital punishment, according to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, but a death sentence now requires a unanimous jury vote. The level of support is probably higher now that the sentencing jury, much to the consternation of families of the victims and others, failed to reach a unanimous verdict for convicted killer Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018. In addition, the DeSantis administration has hardened attitudes towards what he derisively terms “woke liberalism.” Florida is therefore very unlikely to abolish the death penalty any time soon.

But Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty statistics suggest it is time to consider Oregon’s experience. The group’s online report states that 30 persons have been exonerated since 1973 because of wrongful convictions – the highest in the nation; 17 of those are African Americans. One person has been exonerated for every three persons executed.

Also, the four youngest juveniles whom Florida executed were 16 years old and all were African Americans. One of them, Fortune Ferguson, was 13 when he was arrested, tried and convicted in 24 hours – even Iran cannot beat that speed – for allegedly raping an 8-year-old girl. Three of the five women sentenced to death in the country in 2011 were Floridians, all of them African Americans. Florida has never executed a European American solely for killing an African American. And prosecutors are three times more likely to seek the death penalty when the victim is European American than when the victim is African American.

This will not be the first time that this point is being made: It is the height of the ridiculous for a government to have laws against killing and then kill someone who has killed. It is, as Oregon’s Brown asserted, immoral for a government to put any of its citizens to death. And the entire macabre spectacle of a state’s procedure for executions offends the soul. Governments today kill for one of two reasons – or both: revenge or asserting power. Neither can be justified.