No State Should Kill: Why I Oppose the Death Penalty Everywhere

Why I am writing this

On August 6, 2025, the Islamic Republic of Iran hanged my cousin’s son, Roozbeh (Rouzbeh) Vadi. He was a 40-year-old nuclear engineer with a PhD in reactor engineering. His “confession” was extracted through torture and threats against his own mother.

I cannot bring Roozbeh back. I can refuse to stay silent. I oppose the death penalty in every country, for every crime, without exception.

I do not excuse murder, and I do not forget victims. I oppose executions because a state that kills makes mistakes it can never undo. It kills the poor and the powerless first. It tortures people in the process, it damages the people it orders to do the killing, and in places like Iran it uses the gallows to terrify a whole nation.

Every fact below comes from the sources listed at the end of this article. Read it, then decide whether any government on earth deserves this power.

They sentenced innocent people to die

Since 1973, at least 203 people sentenced to death in the United States have later been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). For roughly every eight people the US has executed, one person on death row has walked free.

These were not near misses. By the 200th exoneration, DPI calculated that these men and women had together spent 2,621 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit. In 70.5% of those cases, police, prosecutors or other officials had committed misconduct.

Person	Country	Time condemned	What went wrong
Iwao Hakamada	Japan	Over 45 years on death row; acquitted in September 2024, aged 88	The court found key evidence had been fabricated; Amnesty says his conviction rested largely on a forced confession
Anthony Ray Hinton	USA (Alabama)	Nearly 30 years; freed in April 2015	Convicted by an all-white jury on faulty ballistics; the expert his lawyer hired was blind in one eye
Melissa Lucio	USA (Texas)	Still on death row	A trial judge declared her “actually innocent,” but on September 28, 2026, Texas’s highest criminal court refused to accept that finding

Hakamada was called the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner. For decades, any morning could have been his last.

Millions of people wept watching The Shawshank Redemption, the story of one innocent man who lost 19 years to a wrongful conviction. Anthony Ray Hinton lost nearly 30, waiting to be killed.

How many innocent people never had a sister, a lawyer or a DNA test arrive in time? DPI keeps a separate list of people executed but possibly innocent. Once the state kills, there is no appeal, no apology and no compensation that means anything.

There is no humane way to kill

On the night of September 30, 2026, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row, in a case reported around the world, including by the BBC. According to Associated Press media witnesses, she was given two doses of pentobarbital and was still awake and snoring more than 40 minutes later. One witness said Pike turned to prison officials and asked whether it was supposed to feel that way.

Her lawyers told a federal court she still had a heartbeat and was in “unnecessary agony.” She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, and at the time of writing her condition had not been made public. The state that had just tried to kill her was now trying to keep her alive.

Pike’s 1995 crime was horrific, and I do not minimize it. She was 18 at the time, and her lawyers say her childhood sexual abuse, PTSD and bipolar disorder were never properly put before her jury. UN human rights experts had urged Tennessee to stop the execution. Hours earlier, the US Supreme Court lifted an appeals court’s pause, over a dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor warning of “the grave consequences of an erroneous decision.”

This was not a freak accident. It is a pattern:

Date	Person	State	Method	What happened
May 21, 2026	Tony Carruthers	Tennessee	Lethal injection	Staff tried for over an hour to find usable veins, including in his feet, neck and chest, then called it off. He has always maintained his innocence, and no physical evidence tied him to the killings.
August 2025	Byron Black	Tennessee	Lethal injection	He said on the gurney that he was “hurting so bad.” His autopsy found fluid in his lungs.
April 11, 2025	Mikal Mahdi	South Carolina	Firing squad	The state’s own autopsy showed two wounds, not three. A pathologist for his lawyers concluded the bullets largely missed his heart; the state disputes this.
January 25, 2024	Kenneth Smith	Alabama	Nitrogen gas	Alabama had already failed to kill him by lethal injection in 2022. Witnesses said he stayed conscious for several minutes, then shook and writhed for about two.

DPI counts six other US prisoners whose executions were halted over IV failures between 2009 and the Carruthers attempt. Each method in history was sold as more humane than the last: the rope, the firing squad, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the needle, and now nitrogen gas. Strapping a healthy, helpless person to a table and killing them is cruel, whatever tool is used.

The hidden victims: the people ordered to kill

Every execution needs people to carry it out: wardens, guards, medical staff. The state asks ordinary public employees to take a life, then sends them home to their families.

In 2022, NPR interviewed current and former workers involved in executions in 17 states and the federal prison system. Of the 16 who had taken part in executions, none supported the death penalty afterward. Craig Baxley, who put 10 people to death in South Carolina, told NPR he drank a bottle of scotch a day and was later diagnosed with PTSD. At least one former South Carolina executioner died by suicide.

Ron McAndrew, a former Florida warden, oversaw the 1997 electrocution of Pedro Medina, when flames burst from under the helmet. Decades later he still has flashbacks, and he now campaigns against capital punishment. Don Cabana, who oversaw six executions as warden of Mississippi’s Parchman prison, said: “There is a part of the warden that dies with his prisoner.”

Doctors are put in an impossible position. The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics states that “a physician must not participate in a legally authorized execution,” and the World Medical Association and other medical bodies agree. In Tennessee, the contracted physician involved in Tony Carruthers’ failed execution was confirmed as the physician for Christa Pike’s. Her lawyers challenged his qualifications, a court declined to reopen the hearing, and local station WVLT reported that the same doctor administered her injection. She survived two doses.

Jurors carry it too. Lindy Lou Isonhood, who served on a Mississippi jury that sentenced a man to death in 1994, later sought counseling and was diagnosed with PTSD.

Hollywood has told this story. The Green Mile, adapted from Stephen King like The Shawshank Redemption and directed by the same filmmaker, Frank Darabont, follows death row guards forced through a botched electrocution and then made to execute a man they know is innocent. It shows what that does to them. The wardens, guards and jurors above are not characters in a film. They are living that story, and no one should be ordered to.

Who gets the needle: the poor, the Black and the brown

There is an old saying in American courtrooms: those without the capital get the punishment. The numbers back it up.

Race of the defendant. About 41% of people on US death rows are Black, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s 2021 count, while Black Americans are roughly 13% of the population. In Texas and Louisiana, more than 72% of death row is people of color.
Race of the victim. DPI reports that four-fifths of people executed were convicted of killing white victims. Three-quarters of death sentences involve white victims, even though about half of US homicide victims are Black. The state values some lives more than others.
Race of the jury. Curtis Flowers, a Black man, was tried six times by the same Mississippi prosecutor, who struck 41 of 42 qualified Black jurors. He spent nearly 24 years locked up before the case collapsed.
Race of the exonerated. More than half of death row exonerees are Black: 103 of 191 counted by the Innocence Project.

Then there is money. DPI notes that almost no capital defendants can afford a lawyer. The record includes appointed lawyers who slept or drank during trial, did no investigation, or had never handled a death case.

Anthony Ray Hinton is the proof. The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2014 that his trial lawyer had failed him by not getting a competent ballistics expert. His attorney, Bryan Stevenson, said racial bias and poverty kept him locked up longer. Would a rich man with a private legal team have lost 30 years?

The pattern is global. Around the world, the death penalty falls hardest on ethnic and religious minorities, foreign nationals, the poor and political dissidents. A punishment that depends on your skin, your bank account and your zip code is a lottery with a body count.

A global machine of fear: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel

In 2025, Amnesty International recorded the most executions since 1981: at least 2,707 people in 17 countries, a 78% jump in a single year. That figure leaves out China, which treats its thousands of executions as a state secret.

Country	Recorded executions in 2025
China	Thousands (state secret)
Iran	At least 2,159
Saudi Arabia	At least 356
Yemen	At least 51
United States	47
Egypt	23

Iran and Saudi Arabia alone carried out 93% of all recorded executions.

Iran hanged at least 2,159 people in 2025, more than double the year before and its highest toll since 1981. Nearly half were for drug offences, which fall far short of the “most serious crimes” threshold international law sets for any death sentence. Protesters, dissidents and people accused of spying have been hanged after trials that rights groups say rest on confessions extracted under torture. That is what happened to Roozbeh.

Saudi Arabia set a new national record of at least 356 executions and still carries out beheadings. Two-thirds were for drug offences, and 78% of those drug executions were foreign nationals, far from home and family. Amnesty has also documented that 74 of the 183 people executed for “terrorism” between January 2022 and June 2025 belonged to the country’s long-persecuted Shia minority.

Israel has carried out only two executions since 1948, the last being Adolf Eichmann in 1962. On March 30, 2026, the Knesset voted 62 to 48 to pass the Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, which mandates death by hanging within 90 days of a final ruling. In West Bank military courts, where only Palestinians are tried, death becomes the default sentence. In civilian courts it applies only to killings aimed at denying Israel’s existence, wording critics say is designed to exclude Jewish attackers.

The law’s champions celebrated. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who made the law a condition of his party’s place in the governing coalition, handed out champagne in the Knesset chamber while wearing a gold lapel pin shaped like a noose. “Whoever chooses terrorism chooses death,” he said. Champagne for a law that sends one people to the gallows tells you who the law is for.

Not all of Israel cheered. Forty-eight members of the Knesset voted against it. UN experts said a law that singles out Palestinians for execution treats their lives as less worthy of protection, and Human Rights Watch called it a two-tiered system of justice. Israeli rights groups ACRI and Adalah have challenged it in the High Court, where it remains in force while the case proceeds. As far as I can find, no one has yet been executed under it.

Different flags, same logic. Amnesty’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard, accused a small minority of states of “weaponizing the death penalty to instill fear, crush dissent.” Change is possible: in August 2026, Lebanon became the first country in the Middle East to abolish the death penalty.

Roozbeh: one name behind the numbers

Roozbeh Vadi was a scientist, a son and a member of my family. He held a PhD in reactor engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology and worked at Iran’s Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute. He lived with his mother in the home the family had shared for four decades.

According to Iran Human Rights, he was arrested about 18 months before his death and sentenced by a Revolutionary Court for “espionage for Israel.” The case began with a dispute at work in early 2024. For those 18 months, I did not know where he was, and we did not know that his mother had also been jailed.

I told Iran International, and The Jerusalem Post reported, what happened to him in custody. He was tortured so badly that bones in his leg and two of his ribs were broken. Interrogators showed him photographs of his mother in custody and told him she would be tortured unless he confessed to espionage on camera. Under that threat, he said what they wanted. State television broadcast the “confession.” Iran International described the prosecution as built on a single coerced statement.

Our family says his two trials were overseen by Judge Abolghasem Salavati of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, and that his death sentence was confirmed by Salavati’s son, also a judge. Salavati’s record of death sentences against political prisoners earned him the nickname “the Judge of Death.” The US Treasury sanctioned him in 2019 for presiding over show trials, and the European Union had already sanctioned him. A father and son deciding the same man’s fate is nepotism no justice system should tolerate.

In June 2025, Israel went to war with Iran, and the regime promised swift trials for alleged collaborators. Our family says Roozbeh was being held in Evin Prison when Israel bombed it on June 23. He survived that. On August 6, 2025, the judiciary announced that he had been hanged. I learned of his death from the news, like everyone else.

Iran Human Rights said sentences like his are handed down without fair trials, on confessions obtained under torture. The National Iranian American Council noted that rights groups criticized the lack of transparency and his limited access to lawyers.

Roozbeh was not a spy. The state that killed him never allowed a fair trial. That is the point. When a government can torture a man, jail his mother, broadcast his “confession” and hang him weeks after a war, the death penalty has become a weapon.

Roozbeh’s story is recorded on ParentsPlea, a memorial to lives lost to injustice and war. I want his to be a name you remember.

The myths that keep the gallows standing

“It deters murder.” No one has been able to prove it does. In 2012, the US National Research Council reviewed more than three decades of research and found that studies claiming a deterrent effect were fundamentally flawed. In Israel, most security officials who testified to the Knesset rejected the idea that the new law would deter attacks. If the gallows deterred crime, Iran would be among the safest countries on earth.

“It saves money.” It costs more. Studies consistently find the death penalty is far more expensive than life without parole, because of longer trials, extra lawyers and experts, solitary confinement and years of appeals. Capital trials can run more than four times longer than ordinary ones. In September 2026, families of unsolved homicide victims in Arizona asked for that money to go toward solving their loved ones’ cases instead.

“It brings families closure.” Most death sentences never end in execution. A 2026 analysis by The Marshall Project and The Guardian of more than 9,000 US death sentences found that fewer than one in five ended in execution. Victims’ families are dragged through decades of hearings, appeals and headlines while the promised closure keeps receding.

“Only the worst of the worst get it.” The sections above answer this. The death penalty falls on whoever is poor, Black or brown, mentally ill, foreign, or politically inconvenient. Even conservatives are noticing. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who helped write his state’s death penalty law in 1981, said in June 2026 that Ohio should abolish it.

The world’s human rights defenders agree

I am not alone, and neither is my family. The people who spend their lives documenting abuse have reached the same conclusion:

Amnesty International. When Lebanon abolished the death penalty, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, Heba Morayef, said: “Justice must be rooted in human rights, not in an irreversible and cruel punishment.” With Lebanon, Amnesty counts 114 countries that have abolished it.
Amnesty on Hakamada. After his acquittal, Amnesty said the case reminds us of “the irreversible harm caused by the death penalty” and urged Japan to abolish it.
Human Rights Watch. On Israel’s new law, HRW’s Adam Coogle said: “The death penalty is irreversible and cruel.”
The United Nations. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called on every country that still executes to follow Lebanon and end the practice. UN experts urged Tennessee to spare Christa Pike, and warned Israel that singling out Palestinians for execution is discriminatory and unlawful.
Equal Justice Initiative. Bryan Stevenson, who freed Anthony Ray Hinton, called his case “a case study in what’s wrong with our system.”
Iran Human Rights. On Roozbeh’s execution, IHRNGO said such sentences are handed down without fair trials, on confessions obtained under torture.

International law points the same way. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows the death penalty, if at all, only for the “most serious crimes,” after fair trials, with the right to seek pardon. Executions for drug offences in Iran and Saudi Arabia, confessions extracted under torture, and Israel’s mandatory, no-commutation law all fail that test.

No state should hold the power to kill

I am not asking you to forgive murderers or forget victims. I am asking you to look at what the death penalty is, everywhere it exists. It kills innocent people. It tortures people on the gurney. It scars the guards, wardens, doctors and jurors who are made to take part. It chooses its victims by race, money and politics. And in the hands of regimes like the one that hanged Roozbeh, it is a tool of terror.

If Lebanon could abolish it in the middle of a war, every country can. Tehran and Riyadh can. Nashville, Montgomery and Austin can. Jerusalem can repeal a discriminatory law before a single person hangs under it.

Here is what you can do today:

Share this article, and say Roozbeh Vadi’s name out loud.
Add the names of those lost to injustice at ParentsPlea.
Support the organizations doing this work: Amnesty International, the Death Penalty Information Center, the Equal Justice Initiative, Iran Human Rights, and the Israeli groups ACRI and Adalah.
Tell your elected officials you want the death penalty abolished, not expanded, at home and in every country your government arms, funds or trades with.

Every execution is a decision made in our name. Let’s stop making it.

Sources

All figures are the latest available as of October 1, 2026. Execution counts from Amnesty International are minimums; real totals are likely higher.

Innocence and exonerations: Death Penalty Information Center (Innocence; The 200th exoneration; Executed but possibly innocent; Melissa Lucio) · Amnesty International (Acquittal of Iwao Hakamada) · NBC News, Atmore Advance, Lehman College, WBHM (Anthony Ray Hinton).

Botched executions: BBC News, CBS News, Tennessee Lookout, WVLT, UN Human Rights Office (Christa Pike) · AP via WSLS, Hands Off Cain (Tony Carruthers) · NBC News (Byron Black) · NPR (Mikal Mahdi firing squad autopsy) · GPB/NPR (Kenneth Smith nitrogen execution).

Executioners, doctors and jurors: DPI (Hidden casualties) · NPR (Carrying out executions took a secret toll on workers) · Equal Justice Initiative (The death penalty and regret) · LADbible (Ron McAndrew on the Pedro Medina execution) · AMA Code of Medical Ethics; AMA (Doctor participation in executions unethical) · WSMV (Doctor from botched execution to oversee Pike execution; Pike’s emergency motion denied).