“I Actually Believe I Killed Too Few.”

Sadegh Khalkhali became notorious for handing down death sentences with no regret or regard for due process. The Islamic Republic has since carried his approach across an entire court system.

Sadegh Khalkhali became Iran’s first revolutionary Sharia judge after the 1979 Revolution. The role would eventually earn him a notorious nickname abroad: the “Hanging Judge.” In his memoirs, Khalkhali took responsibility for executing “five hundred and some” people, and the true number of people executed under his command was much, much higher. He wrote explicitly that he felt neither regret nor torment of conscience over the executions.

Few sentences better capture the disregard for human life that began with the Islamic Republic and continues today than Khalkhali’s own words: “I actually believe I killed too few.”

The monarchy fell on February 11, 1979. Within days, executions had begun. On February 24, Khomeini formally gave Khalkhali authority to sit in the revolutionary tribunal and issue judgments according to “the standards of Islamic law” (mavazin-e shar’i).

Khalkhali favored firing squads. In May 1979, he explained his position clearly: “There is no room in revolutionary courts for defense lawyers.” Lawyers, he complained, quoted laws and wasted time. The revolutionary courts had emerged from the anger of the Iranian people, he said, and those people accepted Islamic principles.

For him, procedure obstructed justice because justice had already been decided under Islam. The accused stood before the court after the moral judgment had effectively been made. The court’s role was to use religious and revolutionary authority to hand down whatever punishment it deemed appropriate.

A legitimate legal system places obstacles between accusation and death for a reason.

Presenting evidence and letting a defense lawyer make a case takes time. So do appeals and the possibility that the court might be wrong. Khalkhali had little patience for any of it. He helped build a justice system in which revolutionary certainty could outweigh a human life. Decades after he left power, that same thinking still runs through the Islamic Republic.

When people facing death begged for their lives, Khalkhali dismissed their pleas as “crocodile tears.” He saw only enemies of God. Once someone was given that label, there was little room for pity, and their fear was dismissed as an act. Khalkhali might be gone, but that way of seeing people survived him.

The revolution that brought down the Shah was much bigger than Khomeini and his clerics. Liberals wanted political freedom and an end to authoritarian rule. Marxists opposed the monarchy and the inequality they associated with it. Nationalists resented foreign influence, while religious Iranians had their own grievances against the Shah’s secular rule. They did not agree on what should replace him. They agreed that he had to go, and each group could imagine that the Iran that followed might look something like the country they wanted. Khomeini understood how useful that uncertainty and shared dissatisfaction was.

Speaking to Western journalists from France before the revolution, he carefully presented himself as a spiritual guide rather than the future ruler of Iran.

In November 1978, when asked what role he would have after an Islamic republic was created, Khomeini said: “I don’t have any intention to head this government or be part of it.”

The clerical movement had something many of its allies lacked: organization embedded throughout the country. Mosques provided networks that could mobilize people quickly, and Khomeini possessed religious authority that secular opposition figures could not reproduce. Once the common enemy disappeared, the revolutionary coalition began to fracture. The clerical faction did not.

This is where I think the “trick” of 1979 is often misunderstood. Where we find ourselves today did not require every Iranian who joined the revolution to want a theocracy. It just needed enough people to postpone the argument about what would replace the Shah until the Shah was gone. By the time that argument could no longer be postponed, men like Khalkhali already had prisons and revolutionary courts under their control.

In the same statement in which he rejected defense lawyers, Khalkhali listed involvement in the Shah’s 2,500-year celebration and promotion of the Shiraz Arts Festival among the activities associated with people condemned by the revolutionary courts.

Even something like a cultural festival could be treated as efsad-e fel-arz, or “corruption on earth,” a charge that is still used to sentence people to death in Iran today.

Khalkhali even wrote a pamphlet attacking Cyrus the Great, titled Cyrus the Liar and Criminal. In it, he branded the ancient emperor a “tyrant, a liar, and a homosexual,” portraying him as bloodthirsty and morally corrupt. Accounts from the early revolutionary period describe his effort to destroy Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The exact circumstances are contested, though contemporary witnesses and later researchers say that resistance from locals and officials prevented its destruction

History was only useful when it served Islam. When it competed with the cleric’s story, repeating it became dangerous. The same hierarchy applied to human life. When religious certainty and the life of an accused person clashed, Khalkhali told us which mattered more.

And he was exceptionally crude about it. That may be the sole difference between him and the system that followed. The modern Islamic Republic is smarter and more subtle.

Today, the system looks far more formal than the one Khalkhali ran. Courts, case numbers, and defense lawyers exist, even if prisoners are often denied meaningful access to them. The process may look different, but it can still lead to the same gallows. That is what makes Khalkhali’s contempt for defense lawyers feel so familiar decades later.

In February 2026, Amnesty International documented cases of young Iranians facing death sentences after fast-tracked proceedings connected to nationwide protests. Some had been denied access to lawyers during interrogation. In one case involving an 18-year-old defendant, the organization reported that a judge refused to recognize lawyers his family selected.

Charges rooted in the Islamic Republic’s religious view of political crime can still carry the death penalty. Amnesty International has documented Revolutionary Courts handing down death sentences after sham trials that systematically violate basic fair-trial rights. What Khalkhali once did personally has since become part of a much larger, industrialized state system. In 2025 alone, Amnesty recorded at least 2,159 executions in Iran, more than twice the number it recorded in 2024.

Khalkhali’s final years looked very different from the beginning of the revolution. The man who had once decided people’s deaths in minutes became physically frail, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and serious heart and brain problems before dying in Tehran in November 2003.

But the system he helped build outlived him. The Revolutionary Courts are still operating. Efsad-e fel-arz, or “corruption on earth,” can still carry a death sentence. Defendants can still be denied access to lawyers, and nearly half a century later, the state still executes people it considers enemies under a system that gives them few, if any, protections.

Khalkhali died more than two decades ago, but the system he helped create did not die with him. Iran no longer has a single “Hanging Judge.” The Islamic Republic built a network of judges who could carry on his legacy.

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