At least at first, the revolutionary courts differed from standard Western law courts by limiting trials to a few hours, sometimes minutes. Defendants could be found guilty on the basis of 'popular repute.' The concept of defense attorney was dismissed as a 'Western absurdity.' A charge that was widely applied against defendants but unfamiliar to some was 'sowing corruption on earth' (mofsed-e-filarz). This covered a variety of offenses - "'insulting Islam and the clergy,' 'opposing the Islamic Revolution,' 'supporting the Pahlavis,' and 'undermining Iran's independence' by helping the 1953 coup and giving capitulatory privileges to the imperial powers". Between 1979-1989, the Revolutionary Courts ordered the execution of at least 10,000 political, belonging to anti-revolutionary opposition groups, and sentenced others to death for crimes such as drug trafficking, adultery, sodomy, kidnapping, "disruption of the public order", and "terrorism". It is hard to know how many actual political prisoners were executed, because often of those executed for political crimes were also accused of "drug trafficking" or "sodomy".