>Such flamebait is not appropriate.

In this particular case, the death penalty is relatively commonplace. As in, using OECD as a benchmark, the US executes more people than the average OECD member. I wanted to illustrate the contrast between the American and Norwegian legal systems, not make a statement about the use or validity of the death penalty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty#Global_distributi...

Then it would be appropriate to say "the United States executes prisoners while Norway doesn't." That makes the point fine.

Car crashes are commonplace here. Drunk driving accidents are. Executions occur less often than once a week in the US, mostly in a few select states, and the US has a population of over 300 million people. We (I'm from the US) even have a disproportionately large prison population and the death penalty is still extremely, extremely rare.

That there is death penalty at all is already pretty barbaric and outdated.

From what I read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite... I can certainly conclude that death penalty is commonplace. A majority of the states keep it legal.

"There were 46 executions in 2010". For some perspective, if you think the death penalty is commonplace, then you must think getting killed by lightning is very commonplace.

Commonplace as rare events go. Any American can get hit by a lightning; the actuality of suffering a death penalty concerns a much smaller number of people, namely a select few of those imprisoned for life. Especially in contrast to the OP's comparison to Norway, 46 versus 0 per year makes it pretty commonplace. There are over thousand people "on the list" in dozens of states at the moment.