If I may add to that. First of all, the Iranian judiciary is fundamentally flawed. After the revolution, qualified judges were replaced by religious jurists. There is a fundamental problem having a set of qualified judges in Iran.
The second point is that the issue of narcotics trafficking is rather complex, and there are many accounts of the IRGC being one of the key players in narco-trafficking, which shows a rather cynical game of executing people while the IRGC is trafficking in narcotics. Opium use, including by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, is almost a well-known fact in those inner circles.
What I want to point out is the public spectacle of executions. It doesn't matter why people are being killed, but when you hang them from cranes in the middle of a public square, we think about the law of retaliation in pre-modern Europe. The point is to strike terror into the hearts of the citizenry. It is less important for people why someone is killed; it is more important that they are killed, and they are killed in a gruesome way in public. I think one of the issues that should be on the table—in addition to what Dr. Shaheed said, which is restricting the number of crimes for which there is a death penalty—is simply to push Iran to abolish the death penalty, and I think that within Iran there are many elements that want that to happen.