![On October 29, 2022, Saman found himself in a courtroom presided over by Judge Abolghasem Salavati - a man so infamous for his harsh sentences that prisoners called him "the judge of death"](https://static.prod.iranwire.com/_versions_jpg/articleslide/%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86_Gnzrbox_001488782_JiBV__v516x270__.jpg "On October 29, 2022, Saman found himself in a courtroom presided over by Judge Abolghasem Salavati - a man so infamous for his harsh sentences that prisoners called him "the judge of death"")
Kurdish Iranian rapper Saman Yasin was arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 and sentenced to death after a mock trial before one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s most notorious “hanging judges”.
He lost both his unborn child and his wife to the trauma of his arrest— and several friends inside prison to the Iranian government’s executioners. Saman’s cellmate, Mohsen Shekari, was the first protester executed by the regime.
After months on death row, Saman’s death sentence was canceled but only after a mock execution in the freezing cold. But the harassment didn’t stop after his release from prison, and in 2025, Saman left Iran to begin a new life in exile.
Imprisonment is even worse than execution, he says, and today Saman Yasin speaks for thousands of prisoners still trapped under Iran’s brutal justice system.
Continue reading: ‘I Want Neither Your Heaven Nor Your Hell, Hang Me’: The Day an Iranian Rapper Faced Mock Execution
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