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.
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...