Stoning
Stoning, or lapidation, is a method of capital punishment where a group throws stones at a person until the subject dies from blunt trauma. It has been attested as a form of punishment for grave misdeeds since ancient times.
Stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment in ancient Israel. Its use is attested in the early Christian era, but Jewish courts generally avoided stoning sentences in later times. Only a few isolated instances of legal stoning are recorded in pre-modern history of the Islamic world. In recent decades several states have inserted stoning and other hudud punishments into their penal codes under the influence of Islamist movements. These laws hold particular importance for religious conservatives due to their scriptural origin, though in practice they have played a largely symbolic role and tended to fall into disuse.
The Torah and Talmud prescribe stoning as punishment for a number of offenses. Over the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed a number of procedural constraints which made these laws practically unenforceable. Although stoning is not mentioned in the Quran, classical Islamic jurisprudence imposed stoning as a hadd punishment for certain forms of zina on the basis of hadith. It also developed a number of procedural requirements which made zina difficult to prove in practice.
In recent times, stoning has been a legal or customary punishment in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, Brunei, and tribal parts of Pakistan, including the northwest Kurram Valley and the northwest Khwezai-Baezai region though it is rarely carried out. In some of these countries, including Afghanistan, it has been carried out extrajudicially by militants, tribal leaders, and others. In some other countries, including Nigeria and Pakistan, although stoning is a legal form of punishment, it has never been legally carried out. Stoning is condemned by human rights organizations.
History
Stoning is attested in the Near East since ancient times as a form of capital punishment for grave sins. However stoning as a practice was not geographically limited to only the Near East, and there is significant historical record of stoning being employed among the Greeks and Romans as well. The ancient geographer Pausanias describes both the elder and younger Aristocrates of Orchomenus being stoned to death in ancient Greece around the 7th century BCE.Stoning was "presumably" the standard form of capital punishment in ancient Israel. It is attested in the Old Testament as a punishment for blasphemy, idolatry and other crimes, in which the entire community pelted the offender with stones outside a city. The death of Stephen, as reported in the New Testament was also organized in this way. Paul was stoned and left for dead in Lystra. Josephus and Eusebius report that Pharisees stoned James, brother of Jesus, after hurling him from the pinnacle of the Temple shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Historians disagree as to whether Roman authorities allowed Jewish communities to apply capital punishment to those who broke religious laws, or whether these episodes represented a form of lynching. During the Late Antiquity, the tendency of not applying the death penalty at all became predominant in Jewish courts. Where medieval Jewish courts had the power to pass and execute death sentences, they continued to do so for particularly grave offenses, although not necessarily the ones defined by the law, and they generally refrained from use of stoning.
Aside from "a few rare and isolated" instances from the pre-modern era and several recent cases, there is no historical record of stoning for zina being legally carried out in the Islamic world. In the modern era, sharia-based criminal laws have been widely replaced by statutes inspired by European models. However, the Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along the emergence of Islamist movements calling for full implementation of sharia, including reinstatement of stoning and other hudud punishments. A number of factors have contributed to the rise of these movements, including the failure of authoritarian secular regimes to meet the expectations of their citizens, and a desire of Muslim populations to return to more culturally authentic forms of socio-political organization in the face of a perceived cultural invasion from the West. Supporters of sharia-based legal reforms felt that "Western law" had its chance to bring development and justice, and hoped that a return to Islamic law would produce better results. They also hoped that introduction of harsh penalties would put an end to crime and social problems.
In practice, Islamization campaigns have focused on a few highly visible issues associated with the conservative Muslim identity, particularly women's hijab and the hudud criminal punishments prescribed for certain crimes. For many Islamists, hudud punishments are at the core of the divine sharia because they are specified by the letter of scripture rather than by human interpreters. Modern Islamists have often rejected, at least in theory, the stringent procedural constraints developed by classical jurists to restrict their application. Several countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and some Nigerian states have incorporated hudud rules into their criminal justice systems, which, however, retained fundamental influences of earlier Westernizing reforms. In practice, these changes were largely symbolic, and aside from some cases brought to trial to demonstrate that the new rules were being enforced, hudud punishments tended to fall into disuse, sometimes to be revived depending on the local political climate. The supreme courts of Sudan and Iran have rarely approved verdicts of stoning or amputation, and the supreme courts of Pakistan and Nigeria have never done so.
Unlike other countries, where stoning was introduced into state law as part of recent reforms, Saudi Arabia has never adopted a criminal code and Saudi judges still follow traditional Hanbali jurisprudence. Death sentences in Saudi Arabia are pronounced almost exclusively based on the system of judicial sentencing discretion rather than sharia-prescribed punishments, following the classical principle that hudud penalties should be avoided if possible.
In China, stoning was one of the many methods of killing carried out during the Cultural Revolution, including the Guangxi Massacre.
Religious scripture and law
Judaism
Torah
The Jewish Torah serves as a common religious reference for Judaism. Stoning is the method of execution mentioned most frequently in the Torah.Mishna
Mode of judgment
In rabbinic law, capital punishment may be inflicted by only the verdict of a regularly constituted court of twenty-three qualified members. There must be the most trustworthy and convincing testimony of at least two qualified eyewitnesses to the crime, who must also depose that the culprit had been forewarned of the criminality and the consequences of such a project. The culprit must be a person of legal age and of sound mind, and the crime must be proved to have been committed of the culprit's free will and without the aid of others.In the Talmud, the specific method of stoning involved throwing the condemned person off a height, typically twice the height of an average person, so that they would fall to the ground. If the fall did not result in death, a large stone would be dropped on the person's chest. If this still did not cause death, bystanders would then continue to hurl stones until the person was dead.
Christianity
New Testament
In John 7:53–8:11, Jesus saves a woman accused of committing adultery from being stoned to death by challenging her accusers that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone at her. This causes her accusers to depart as they realize that not one of them is without sin. Jesus then tells the woman that he too does not condemn her and instructs her to go and sin no more.Islam
Under Islamic sharia law stoning is the prescribed punishment for adultery in public, requiring at least four witnesses to the sexual act, based on the Quran and the hadith as primary sources. While stoning is not mentioned as a form of capital punishment in the canonical text of the Quran, it is prescribed in various hadiths.Contemporary legal status and use
Countries that retain a provision for the punishment of stoning in their laws: Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and, until 2020, the United Arab Emirates.Countries in which stonings have recently been carried out: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan.
Afghanistan
Stoning has been reinstated as a form of punishment after the Taliban regained power in 2021. In 2023, the Taliban reaffirmed their commitment to administering the death penalty by stoning, focusing in their message especially on the punishment of women for the crime of adultery. There have been reports of the Taliban stoning women to death.Before the Taliban government, most areas of Afghanistan, aside from the capital, Kabul, were controlled by warlords or tribal leaders. The Afghan legal system depended highly on an individual community's local culture and the political or religious ideology of its leaders. Stoning also occurred in lawless areas, where vigilantes committed the act for political purposes. Once the Taliban took over in 1996, it became a form of punishment for certain serious crimes or adultery. After the fall of the Taliban government, the Karzai administration re-enforced the 1976 penal code which made no provision for the use of stoning as a punishment. In 2013, the Ministry of Justice proposed public stoning as punishment for adultery. However, the government had to back down from the proposal after it was leaked and triggered international outcry.