Public Execution: the Role of Media and Fear of Crime (Case Study: Death Penalty for Ruhollah Dadashi's Murderer)

Media panic, and its concomitant fear of crime, is a crucial variable in outlining crime policy. The present study attempts to investigate the impacts of media, fear of crime, and penal populism on public execution of those sentenced to death penalty. For this purpose, the authors focused on the murder of Ruhollah Dadashi, a popular athlete on the media, in order to test the study variables. The statistical population of this field study consisted of 225 citizens of Tehran, and the study was carried out over a two-month period starting from October 2011. Our findings indicated that the fear of murder among the respondents was at a lower level compared to fear of other crimes they were asked about (e.g. burglary, rape, assault and battery, reckless driving accidents, pickpocketing and snatching, slander, or being offended or harassed). In addition, punitiveness of respondents toward premeditated murder was much greater than their punitiveness toward non-premeditated murder. It should also be noted that despite the respondents’ rejection of the idea of public execution and their negative view on death penalty for those who are under the age of 20, the respondents were totally satisfied with the public execution of Ruhollah’s Dadashi’s murderer, who was under 18. The inconsistency appears to have stemmed from the media portrayal of the victim as well as the representation of the offender as a “bad guy” or a “hoodlum”, which inevitably resulted in intensified penal populism in sentencing and publicly executing the offender.