Reality in the McPaper

So, I'm looking through the USA Today and I see this picture (not reproduced here; it's hard to take.) The caption read: A woman is lead away to execution immediately after being sentenced to death in China. 2001.)

Bits of the article:

BEIJING — China's move to give a top court final say on all death sentences should slow the furious pace of executions here, even though many non-violent offenses remain capital crimes, legal experts say.

Chinese legal scholars and lawyers welcomed this week's announcement by the government that the country's Supreme People's Court will review all capital punishment cases.

The change is “an important procedural step to prevent wrongful convictions,” said China's top judge, Xiao Yang, according to the state-run Xinhua news service.

China was responsible for 81% of the world's known executions — 1,770 out of 2,184 — last year, according to Amnesty International. Amnesty said the actual number of executions in China could be several times higher. In the USA, 60 people were executed in 2005.

The reviews by the high court “should reduce the total number of executions by one-quarter or even a third,” says Chen Weidong, a criminal law expert at People's University in Beijing.

Human rights groups and Chinese legal scholars have criticized the Chinese government for excessive use of the death penalty and for carrying out some executions after sham trials.

Sixty-eight offenses — including non-violent crimes such as tax evasion, drug smuggling and corruption — carry the death penalty.

snip

In response to the criticism, the government has introduced a series of reforms as part of a policy it calls “kill fewer, kill carefully.”

Fewer. Carefully. Sound like "safe, legal and rare"?