Iran’s same-day death sentences show its brutality, again
Order echoes 1988 death commissions, when tens of thousands died.
The Dallas Morning News | By Ted Poe | May 15, 2026
For more than 20 years, before I went to Congress, I sat on a criminal court bench in Texas. I presided over more than 20,000 cases. I know what a courtroom is supposed to be. It is the place where the state’s power to take a person’s liberty, property, or life is restrained — by procedure, by evidence, by the right to a defense and by the deliberate pace of justice. A courtroom that abandons those safeguards is not a court. It is something else.
Last month, Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Eje’i, made clear what that “something else” looks like.
Speaking to judicial officials in Tehran, Eje’i declared that his courts had adopted a “combat stance,” according to reporting from a longstanding Iranian opposition group. Political cases, he said, must no longer follow normal procedures. Files that once took days to investigate must now be completed within hours. Interrogators are to leave their offices and question defendants directly in prison. Indictments must be drafted at speed. There must be “no delay or hesitation” in carrying out sentences—whether executions or property confiscations. “No leniency whatsoever” is to be shown.
These are not the directives of a judiciary. They are the orders of a system designed for rapid punishment, one in which the outcome is predetermined and the process exists only to legitimize it.
Consider what this means in practice. A case file is assembled in hours. An interrogator drafts the charges in a prison cell. A trial, if it can be called that, is brief. Review is perfunctory. The sentence is carried out immediately. Families receive no warning. There is no time for appeal, no opportunity for defense, no space for justice.
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We have already seen the consequences. Families of victims such as Akbar Daneshvarkar, Mohammad Taghavi, Babak Alipour and Pouya Ghobadi were given no advance notice before their executions. According to Amnesty International, their trials were “grossly unfair.” Reports of torture and coerced confessions are widespread. Final goodbyes were denied.
These cases are not isolated. In a matter of weeks, the regime has executed 18 political prisoners: eight members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and 10 young protesters arrested during the January uprising. Others remain on death row, facing imminent execution.
Eje’i’s directive is not simply rhetoric. It is a procedural blueprint for what comes next.
We have seen this blueprint before. In 1988, the Iranian regime established what came to be known as “Death Commissions.” Political prisoners — many already serving sentences — were brought before small panels and asked a handful of questions. Those whose answers were deemed unsatisfactory were executed within hours. There were no real trials. No defense. No meaningful review. By credible estimates, as many as 30,000 people were killed.
The procedural fingerprint of 1988 — summary processing, denial of defense, immediate execution — is unmistakable in Eje’i’s orders today.
This time, however, the regime is not concealing its intent. It is declaring it openly. Even the United Nations Human Rights Council has warned of increased targeting of political prisoners. Now, the regime itself has confirmed that warning in its own words.
Ted Poe is a former Republican member of Congress from Texas. He served as a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and was chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non-proliferation and Trade. He served as a Texas criminal court judge for more than 20 years.
