It is mere coincidence that you respect one country's due process and don't respect another country's due process.
Most places have non-arbitrary paths to punishment or any state actions, codified somewhere. And our media and pop culture just doesn't acknowledge that.
The similarities are greater than the dissimilarities.
> The primary source of law is the Islamic Sharia derived from the teachings of the Qur'an and the Sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet). Saudi Arabia is unique among modern Muslim states in that Sharia is not codified and there is no system of judicial precedent, giving judges the power to use independent legal reasoning to make a decision. Saudi judges tend to follow the principles of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence (fiqh) found in pre-modern texts and noted for its literalist interpretation of the Qur'an and hadith.
> Because the judge is empowered to disregard previous judgments (either his own or of other judges) and may apply his personal interpretation of Sharia to any particular case, divergent judgments arise even in apparently identical cases, making predictability of legal interpretation difficult.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia#Legal_system
Welp... I guess Saudi Arabia is off my bucket list
But the point is that many people respect the system they are raised under, and are aware of others systems. Its not a comparison of "the US to Saudi Arabia" its an acknowledgment of the nation state reality.
Sometimes cultural relativism gets it right and opens our eyes to our own inadequacies, but this isn’t one of those times. Saudi justice is light-years (or maybe centuries) from US justice.
Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship run by tyrants who order members of their own family kidnapped abroad, journalists murdered then cut up their bodies to hide the crime, and imprison then extort leading businessmen to consolidate power and money in their hands. They have far more in common with Putin’s Russia than the US.
The US is a long way from that, whatever its flaws (and there are many flaws, chief amongst them making alliances with brutal dictators like the Saudis).
Extraordinary rendition? Foreign policy in most places is different from domestic policy.
The similarities are greater than the dissimilarities.
The sentencing is so harsh for anyone demanding trial and losing that it's mostly a paper right at this time. It does give people the warm fuzzy feeling of justice and correctness though.
If you're used to the EU justice or penal systems (very far from perfect and sometimes not even good, mind you), looking at the US systems must feel similar to a US citizen looking at SA justice - very lopsided, barbaric or cruel, disproportionate, and nothing close to fair.
[0] https://innocenceproject.org/guilty-pleas-on-the-rise-crimin...