Amina Lawal's Appeals Court trial date was Thursday (23 Jan 2003) but it was continued for another two months.  She faces a sentence of death by stoning from this Sharia-law court if her earlier sentence is upheld.  The judge apparently views the sentence as an appropriate deterrent:

"The best deterrent is the death sentence, for people to see what happens to a fornicator," said Grand Khadi Aminu Ibrahim Katsina, the judge. "They watch you be stoned to death. They wouldn't want it to happen to them. So it definitely would be a deterrent."

[From The New York Times: As Stoning Case Proceeds, Nigeria Stands Trial.]

Well yeah.  Stoning someone is inhumane, but one could make the same argument for any type of punishment designed to end in death, regardless of its deterrent effect.  But the problem here is less the punishment but the codification of the crime underlying it.

See also: Amina Lawal appeal set for March

As I've mentioned before, my firm is about to reimplement a CRM application.  The plan at this point is to have a very limited and highly focused implementation, based in our Marketing and Business Development departments and open to a few exclusive partners and practice groups who actively market their practices.  I promised that I'd blog this process from beginning to end, so here we go...