You get to decide which is which!

…five countries carried out 88 percent of all known executions worldwide: China (470 people), Iran (317), Saudi Arabia (143), Pakistan (135) and the United States (42).

Personally, I’m kind of (happily) surprised the numbers are so low. Though the report makes it clear that the numbers from China are, well, unclear.

How about:

In Iran, for example, a father of two was stoned to death for adultery. An Egyptian national was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for practicing sorcery.

Hmm. I guess it’s good we’re not in that category.

And a factory manager in North Korea was shot by a firing squad because he appointed his children as managers and made international phone calls.

So, in North Korea, if you appoint your kid to an important position and call people in different countries, you get shot? Someone dig up Kim Il Sung, I’ll buy the bullets!

All in all, it seems weird to equate “the death penalty” as a thing separate from the judicial system that implements it. Certainly there are some people who are wholeheartedly against it, no matter the crime, but I think that opposition to it is extremely correlated to the crimes for which it is applied. But if Iran is executing people for adultery, and North Korea for running up phone bills, then “the death penalty” isn’t the problem — if they didn’t execute them, they’d torture or imprison them. And so while I am thankful it’s not as bad as that here, our criminal justice system also needs a great deal of fixing. Currently it seems that there are enough high profile cases of error that we should be extremely sparing in the use of capital punishment — but that doesn’t mean we can say “great, problem solved!” and walk away. These problems go much deeper, and while I hesitate to equate them with the potential death of an innocent prisoner, they have a great deal of impact on all our lives.