Contrarianism and counter-intuitiveness are great, but one can take them too far, too, and it sure looks like that is what the New York Times did in a front-page news article from Saudi Arabia about "avenues for mercy" in the Saudi legal system. The Times reports:
No aspect of Saudi justice draws more attention than punishments like beheading or amputation. But Saudi legal practitioners say that penalties are on the books to deter crime and that the system limits their use.
In Saudi jurisprudence adultery and apostasy merit death, but executions for either are rare because the law makes it hard to secure convictions. Adultery, for example, can be proved by the testimony of witnesses, but they must be four Muslim men who see the sex act itself — proof nearly impossible to obtain.
As part of its effort to show that Saudi justice isn't really as bad as we Westerners think, the Times offers up this statistic: "Saudi Arabia executed 88 people in 2014, while 35 people were executed in the United States." The Times doesn't mention that America's population is more than 10 times that of Saudi Arabia, so on a per capita basis, the Saudis are using capital punishment more than 20 times as much as the U.S. does. And the U.S. is considered bloodthirsty on this issue by a lot of Europe and Canada, where capital punishment is effectively nonexistent.