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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

The USA has the death penalty for children, so lets jump off the high horse on that one.

Mustafa al-Darwish also was older than 18 for part of it (And one assumes the terrorism charge would have been later in the timeline) which fits with SA saying they no long execute children, which would make them better than the USA on that issue.

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All death penalties are not equal.

When was the last time the USA killed a child for a photo they didn't like? If you were to be a child and got killed in the US, you surely deserved it. If you were a child and got killed in Saud, you probably just pissed off some little fascist.

As you can see by the number of downvotes, sometimes reason is unwelcome even on HN.

The problem with this comment is that it fails to account for the fact that US and other democratic countries have a reasonable judicial system that while flawed is not totally under the thumb of the government. One can be sure that a death sentence in western courts is atleast well debated and pondered over, the same unfortunately can't be said of middle East, where just writing bad about a ruler can get u chopped to pieces.

Uh, I think he got downvoted for being wrong, not for being reasonable. The US used to execute people who were minors when they committed their offense, but no longer does. It was abolished by the Supreme Court in 2005, and the last time it happened was in 2003 (the execution of a 32 year old man who, when he was 17, deliberately burned two people to death.) So his information is almost two decades out of date.

The 2005 SCOTUS decision abolishing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roper_v._Simmons

It's whataboutism, not "reason".

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