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Originally Posted by Ustwo
So in other words we execute and Western Europe doesn't anymore.
Just say that then instead of making a point about size and empire like status.
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Unfortunately, you have again missed the point and made a false assumption.
Large, powerful countries have large, complex problems - both internally and externally - somewhat moreso than their smaller neighbours. The often have high crime rates and any individual crime is usually lost in the shuffle.
The desire to bring a sense of order to what some sometimes seems a disordered out of control society is perhaps more powerful in those large, powerful societies given the many pressures the society faces. Stronger measures are sometimes enacted - death penalty, longer prison sentences, 3 strikes - in reponse and the people may approve of such measures more readily.
Individual instances of a miscarriage of justice seem to pale in comparison to the thousands of killings that occur yearly.
In a nation such as Canada, where even in the largest cities like Toronto and Montreal the murder rates are far lower, when someone (as Ace pointed out) like Truscott, Milgard or Morin gets wrongly imprisoned for what, at one point, would have been a crime for which execution was the punishment, the population, in large part, recoils and sets themselves more firmly against the concept of capital punishment.
In larger nations, this reaction does not seem as strong.