Iran Ups The Stakes In Mahsa Amini Protests, Sentences One Protester To Death.
Iran has escalated matters with the protesters out in force over the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody.
Despite Iranian police having already kill hundreds of protesters, the mullahs raised the stakes yet again by sentencing one protester to “death”.
A Tehran court on Sunday issued a death sentence linked to "riots," the judiciary's Mizan Online website said.
Iran has been rocked by nationwide protests since the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody. The 22-year-old woman was arrested by Iran's notorious morality police for allegedly improperly dressing in line with the country's strict dress code.
According to Mizan Online, Sunday's sentence was handed for the crime of "setting fire to a government building, disturbing public order, assembly and conspiracy to commit a crime against national security, and an enemy of God and corruption on earth."
While the prior killings were themselves an escalation, having the Iranian government give those prior killings the imprimatur of legal proceeding ups the ante even further.
At the same time, with the protesters taking to open mockery of Islamic clerics, one wonders how much impact such death sentences being handed down by Iranian courts can have.
The danger for the Islamic Republic is that if the protesters do not back down in the fact of repeated escalations by the regime, the endpoint is regime change and the fall of the Islamic Republic.
The situation is not yet at the point where regime change is inevitable, but, in a bit of perverse irony, the regime itself may just have moved Iran one step closer to regime change.