Back in March, the Times ran a front-page news article by Ben Hubbard under the headline, "Saudi Justice, Harsh But Able To Spare The Sword." The gist of it was that Saudi justice is more lenient than it is commonly given credit for:
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....Saudi Arabia executed 88 people in 2014, while 35 people were executed in the United States.
At the time, SmarterTimes found the story troubling. In a post headlined, "Apologists for Saudi Beheadings," we noted, "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."
An update is in order. The Independent reports:
Saudi Arabia has executed at least 175 people in the past year, at a rate of one every two days, according to a report by Amnesty International.
The kingdom killed 102 convicted criminals in the first six months of 2015 alone, putting it on course to beat its 1995 record number for the calendar year of 192. Those killed included children under the age of 18 at the time of the offence, and disabled people.
Amnesty, which alongside the AFP news agency keeps a record of the number of people the Saudi government kills, said the execution rate suddenly surged in August last year and continued to rise under the new King Salman from January.
So far the Times hasn't seen fit to give its readers this update on the Saudi death toll, leaving readers with the false front-page impression of leniency.
Maybe King Salman figured that if even the New York Times wasn't going to give Saudi Arabia a hard time about its public beheadings, there wasn't much downside in upping the pace.