Posted on 08/31/2003 3:34:09 AM PDT by sarcasm
For the crime of having sex outside of marriage, 33-year-old Amina Lawal could be wrapped in a white shroud, taken to a killing ground and buried in sand up to her neck.
The Islamic court that convicted Lawal would choose men to pick through a truckload of rocks for stones big enough to cause pain - but not big enough to kill her with one blow.
Then, on the executioner's signal, they would hurl them at the trapped woman's head until her skull cracked.
Lawal faces the possibility of a slow, tortured death because under Sharia, the harsh Islamic law of northern Nigeria, she committed a crime when she fell for a cad - and had his baby.
That she was divorced when she took a lover was not a mitigating factor.
Convicted in March 2002, Lawal will be sentenced Sept. 25. She learned of the gruesome penalty at a court appearance last week in the town of Katsina.
"I've never been this afraid," she said.
Living evidence
Prosecutor Nurulhuda Mohammad said the 2-year-old girl Lawal was nursing was "enough evidence" that a crime had been committed. "There is no other excuse that is acceptable," he added.
The law is so out of sync with reality that Lawal's attorney, Amina Musa Yawuri, argued that a baby can gestate in a woman's womb for five years, making it possible for little Wasila to be the child of Lawal's ex-husband.
Yawuri entered this implausible defense because Lawal's alleged lover says he is not Wasila's father. And in a court system where DNA evidence is unheard of and a man's word trumps a woman's, he has not been charged with a crime.
Peasant's plight
The plight of Lawal, a poor, illiterate peasant from rural Nigeria, has outraged human rights advocates and caused a furor in the religiously riven African country.
"The legal system is being used to punish adult women for consensual sex," LaShawn Jefferson, executive director of the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch, said recently. "The death penalty is never an appropriate punishment for a crime, and, in this instance, the very nature of the crime is in doubt."
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, apparently reluctant to challenge Islamic courts for fear of sparking a civil war, has made conflicting statements about intervening in the controversial case.
Krista Riddley, Amnesty International's advocacy director for Africa, said that because Lawal is Muslim, her fate - for now - lies with the Sharia court that convicted her.
"Amina's lawyers want to see the case go through the judicial process and will likely appeal to the Islamic appeals court," Riddley said. "Should this appeal fail, there's the federal level and the supreme court. She still has some time."
Does anyone want to be on their side?
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