The death penalty — the US isn't totally an outlier

First, off to those nice polite Canadians.

Canada doesn't actually have the death penalty. It got rid of it long ago. But, via David Moscrop at Substack? A majority of Canadians wish they had it.

In this year’s survey, just over half of Canadians (53 per cent, down five points since 2023) think the death penalty is “sometimes” appropriate. About one in four (26 per cent, up one point) say it is “never” appropriate, while 14 per cent (up five points) say it is “always” appropriate.

Interestingly, per the story, that's a marginal decline from 2020, but not a real decline:

Starting in 2020, Research Co. and Glacier Media have asked Canadians annually about their views on the death penalty for murder. Although our country eliminated this possibility in July 1976, we have consistently seen about half of Canadians voicing support for reinstating capital punishment.

Also interestingly, that 53 percent doesn't exactly match with:

Lest one thinks, from what Americans know of politics north of the border from south of the border, this isn't all Conservatives. 

Conservative voters in 2021 are more likely to endorse this course of action (69 per cent) than counterparts who voted for the Liberal Party (56 per cent) or the New Democratic Party (49 per cent).

I guess Greens don't count in Canadian polling any more than in US polling. (Canada has no real equivalent of the US Libertarian Party. In Europe, people who identify as libertarian there think that US L/libertarians are fucking nuts, and they're right.)

There's also one other point, that we'll get to in more detail in a minute.

The intriguing fluctuations on this question are related to ethnic origin. While 31 per cent of Canadians of European descent believe the death penalty is “never” appropriate, the proportions are lower among respondents whose origins are Indigenous (20 per cent), South Asian (15 per cent) and East Asian (10 per cent).

Really? Yes.

Japan is one of four democracies, or alleged ones, that still has the death penalty. Per Wiki, it's executed 98 people this century. Aside from the US, those other countries are Singapore (shock) and Taiwan. It's also still on the books in South Korea, but on hiatus there since 1998.

And, I don't think I need to spell out the ethnicity of those places.

Now, the 98 in Japan is far fewer than the 1,018 in the US this century. 

That then said, what prompted this is that Japan, in at least one case, has shown that it can be as egregious in prosecutorial misconduct in a murder trial as in the US.