• Amina Ali Abduladif was convicted of the murder of her husband, who had been killed in January 1998. She was sentenced to death on 24 May 1999.

• At the time of the sentencing, she was 16. Some accounts place her age at the time of the killing at 14. At the time of the killing, she was also reportedly a mother of two - which implies marriage at age 11 or 12.

• According to Amnesty International, the Yemeni Penal Code expressly prohibits the use of the death penalty against anyone convicted of crimes committed when they were under 18. This is a sufficiently specific and documentable fact that I'm willing to take Amnesty's word for it.

• Amina Ali Abduladif claims she had been tortured to force her to confess, and has since asserted her innocence. True? No idea.

• Muhammad Ali Said Qaba'il was also sentenced to death for the murder, but it is not known when he is scheduled for execution. DailyKos.com seems to think this means Amina must be innocent, but if you think for a second, it doesn't. There are some reports that Qaba'il was Amina's lover, and that they plotted together to kill her husband. Amnesty lists him as being 5 years older than Amina, which makes him 19 at the time of the murder.

• A court of appeal upheld Amina's sentence in July 2001. Yemen's Supreme Court upheld the sentence in July 2002, and the sentence was ratified by Yemen's President shortly afterwards.

• Not long after the president ratified the sentence, Amina Ali Abduladif was, according to her lawyer, put before a firing squad. It was only when the executioners noticed that she was pregnant that the execution was stopped. According to her lawyer she had been raped by one of the guards at al-Mahaweet prison.

• As a result she gave birth to a child, who is with her in Sana'a Women Central prison, where she is now held. The child is now very nearly two years old, which is a significant age under Shari'a law.

• Now that she had given birth and the baby is almost 2 years old, she is once again eligible to be executed.

• She was reportedly scheduled to be executed on May 2, 2005, but this has now been delayed pending further review of her case.

Amnesty is campaigning for withdrawal of the death sentences on both Amina Ali Abduladif and Muhammad Ali Said Qaba'il. As someone who believes the death penalty is sometimes justified, I'm not.

I'm not aware of any mitigating circumstances for Qaba'il, who was 19 at the time. If he did it, and they have a death penalty for murder, so be it.

If Yemeni law does indeed prohibit execution of minors, on the other hand, then Amina should have her sentence commuted at the very least. I won't push for them to rescind her conviction entirely; murder is too serious. I would support a new trial for Amina, however, in order to dispel any lingering doubts. That trial should adhere to Yemeni law re: sentences, and disallow the death penalty as an option given her age at the time.

Which brings us to something interesting: what if she did in fact plot to kill her husband with the lover, and did it in cold blood? Isn't that pretty serious? If so, why the sympathy for Amina?

It's a good question, because the answers teach us things.

One context comes from understandable doubts about the trustworthiness of justice in Yemen. Islamic law is highly biased against women in a number of important ways, and Yemeni authorities are not restrained by very much in their methods. That's worth keeping in mind - some places really are very different from here.

So it's possible that she was wrongly convicted, and is completely innocent.

Possible, but to be butally honest I wouldn't bet $1,000 on that proposition.

In the West, the another context for the outrage is the (arranged/ forced) marriage of a girl of 11 or 12. "Young girl, forced marriage, finds true love and seeks escape" is a strong subtext, one that owes a great deal to the triumph of the notion of romantic love in Western civilization. There is a school of thought that says "she escaped a prison in the only way she could, even if it meant risking a different prison." In a culture without the freedom and safety to divorce, there's a ring of potential truth to that. Won't play very well in Aden, I bet, but if the shoe fits....

It's good for us to remember that as we contemplate Ismaic customs - and the origins and rationale for some of our own.

As we read a story like this, there's also a justified repugnance at the treatment of women as chattel. Before we hear about Islamic law being perfectly fine for women, or excuses that this behaviour isn't Islamic law, save it. The Prophet himself married younger than this, and in many mainstream schools of Islamic thought that makes the practice praiseworthy rather than exceptional. Chattel status is implicit in allowing marriages to girls who are not even remotely in a position to make such decisions (11?!?). Subsequent grants of other rights don't negate that, just modify it, unless the same treatment is meted out to boys of a comparable age.

Anyone know Yemeni customs well enough to say?

Presumably, this sort of marriage is less remarkable in Yemen, where tribal (and Islamic) precedent tend to see nothing wrong with this. As such, arguments on this basis are unlikely to be convincing to the Yememis mentioned here. If you're writing letters, therefore please stick to the legal grounds against the death penalty, doubts about the reliability of her confession, and the need to find and prosecute the guard who abused her.

So, if these doubts exist, what should we do?

For one thing, we take a deep breath and consider the possibility that Amina could also be a lying, scheming bitch who knew exactly what she was doing, did it for ignoble reasons, and took steps to get pregnant in jail of her own volition in order to escape a firing squad for a while. I wouldn't bet $1,000 on this possibility either, but such people do exist. If your sympathy meter is redlining, it might be worthwhile to at least contemplate that possibility and ask: am I completely sure it isn't the real story here?

That's why I'm advocating a new trial and a commuted sentence for Amina in line with Yemeni law, rather than simply urging them to set Amina free.

Then there's our side of the equation, and what incidents like this teach us. One may explain why Yemen has its customs, but that doesn't make them correct or of equal standing with our own. Amina's kind of marriage was once common in the West, too. No longer. That's so for a number of reasons, and they're worth reflecting on.

We might consider:

• How many experiences like this we saw in the West when marrying very young, via arranged marriages, with no real recourse to divorce was still common in the West. We often see our legal structure, and forget the human experiences that motivated it.

• How laws about "age of consent" relate to the fact that marriage is connected to childrearing, and how laws that invalidate under-age consent are aimed at removing marriage as a necessity before one can reasonably hope to make such a deicsion. At least, in societies that strongly value both family and the endurance of the marriage bond.

• How these kinds of measures began to create a framework of greater reproductive freedom for women - something that goes far beyond just abortion - and the effects that has had over time.

If the Amina Ali Abduladif case gets a number of people motivated to take action on her behalf, and provokes at least some people to consider what it teaches us about our own customs as well as those in Yemen, it will have done a lot of good. Kudos, again, to the Kucinich folks for pushing. If only Kuchinich.us would add Iran as a targets of public protest for the girls it executes... and perhaps they will in future.

That would be very positive too.

UPDATE: M. Al-Jabri has translated the story of Amina and how her husband was murdered. The story has been written by Shadha Mohammed Nasser, a lawyer at the Supreme Court. It is of two parts. If anyone is interested in the Amina case, please click.