This judgment of Branch 20 of the Tehran Civil Court concerning state liability for the material and non-material harm suffered by an individual who endured eleven years of imprisonment following a wrongful criminal conviction and was ultimately acquitted by the Supreme Court of Iran. The judgment is notable not merely for recognizing the claimant’s right to compensation, but for confronting a more fundamental question: when a grave miscarriage of justice occurs, should the resulting harm be attributed to the individual judge or to the judicial system itself?It seems that Iranian law requires a sharper distinction between judicial error attributable to an individual judge and systemic judicial error arising from deficiencies in the institutional structure, procedural framework, or operation of the justice system. Article 171 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran distinguishes between judicial fault and judicial
error, both is plausibly be traced to the conduct of a single judge. In the present case, the claimant was initially sentenced to death, subsequently received sentences of life imprisonment and twenty-five years’ imprisonment, and was ultimately acquitted after an extraordinary review. Such a procedural trajectory raises concerns extending beyond the correctness of any particular judicial decision and implicates the reliability, coherence, and predictability of the adjudicatory system as a whole. Eleven years of wrongful imprisonment, preceded by the experience of approaching execution, exposes a broader need within Iranian law for a coherent doctrine of state responsibility for miscarriages of justice, one capable of addressing not only individual judicial fault, but also institutional failures for which the judicial system itself must assume responsibility.