Shirin Ebadi, in The New York Times Magazine.
The judge had granted us just 10 days to read the entire dossier, thousands of pages. That would be our only access to the investigation’s findings, our only chance to build our case. The disarray of the investigation, the attempts to cover up the state’s hand and the mysterious prison suicide of a lead suspect compounded our difÞculty in learning the truth. The stakes could not have been higher. It was the Þrst time that the Islamic republic acknowledged it had murdered its critics — it said that a rogue squad within the Ministry of Intelligence was responsible — and that a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable…
After surveying the sheer volume of files, stacks up to our heads, we realized that we would have to read them concurrently and, therefore, except for one of us, out of order. The other lawyers allowed me to start at the beginning, so each page I hurriedly turned, my eyes were the first to see…
Around noon, our energy þagged, and we called to the young soldier in the hall for some tea. The moment the tea arrived, we bent our heads down again. I had reached a page more detailed, and more narrative, than any previous section, and I slowed down to focus. It was the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad during the worst wave of killings. When my eyes Þrst fell on the sentence that would haunt me for years to come, I thought I had misread. I blinked once, but it stared back at me from the page: “The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi.” Me.