Death Commuted to Life for Iranian Accused of Running Porn Site

TEHRAN—This will be the fifth article AVN has published about the sad and interminable saga of Iranian Saeed Malekpour, whose abuse over years at the hands of the Iranian justice system has now culminated in his second death sentence being commuted to a life sentence by the religious authorities. Obviously, that is good news for the 36-year-old programmer and his wife, who has been working with the Canadian government since his arrest to get him released, but it remains an absurdly unjust sentence for such a minor charge. As AVN reported in January of last year, “The married 35-year-old engineer and programmer, who had lived in Canada as a permanent resident since 2004, was originally detained by Iranian authorities in 2008 after traveling back home to visit his father, who was ill. He was charged with helping design porn sites in Canada, and despite appeals from the Canadian government, his family and others that he was innocent of the charges, he was convicted and sentenced to death in December 2010. The Iranian Supreme Court commuted the sentence in June 2011, but this week it reversed itself.” At the time, it was theorized that Malekpour’s second death sentence by a regime that has no problem carrying them out was because of global politics. “One media outlet said the reversal may have taken place because of ‘political pressure,’ implying it's a sidebar to the Strait of Hormuz face-off, which is possible though of scant consolation to poor Malekpour, who has spent the last four years of his life in a byzantine hell of Iranian theocratic madness and now finds himself a political pawn in an equally perverse showdown, facing death after having already been spared,” AVN reported. There is no indication yet if politics played a hand in this latest decision, which was announced unceremoniously.  “Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaei is quoted by the semiofficial Mehr news agency, which is often used by the government to make announcements, as saying Monday that blogger Saeed Malekpour will spend the rest of his life in jail," the AP reported today. “Tabatabaei said the Iranian-Canadian computer programmer has repented,” it continued. “Iranian media have called Malekpour the head of the biggest Persian-language network of pornographic websites.” That characterization of Malekpour appears to be a gross exaggeration if not an outright lie by Iran’s state-run media. According to the original complaints, he was accused of helping design only one adult website, maybe a few, but his Canadian colleagues claim that even that was inaccurate. According to AVN’s 2010 coverage of the Malekpour story, “Supporters said he had simply worked as a freelance website developer and programmer, creating a program to allow designers to upload photos to their websites.” In any case, he certainly doesn't deserve to be murdered or jailed for life, just as he did not deserve to be abused by Iranian fascists for years on end. Hopefully, in a world gone less mad, a last story will be able to be written when justice is finally served and Malekpour is released from prison and allowed to return home to his family and friends in Canada. Photo: Iran's notorious Erin prison.