I was inspired by a Google+ conversation about this figure. So I took numbers of executions from here and population from here (28 January 2013). Execution numbers are from 2011 and population, I think from 2008 to 2011. Malaysia and Syria were not included as no number was given in the source for the number of executions. For China I rounded the number to 1000 even though the source gives an estimate from about 1000 to 4000. The original spreadsheet can be found here
Figure 1. Number of executions per 100 000 people in 2011
Figure 2. Log(number of executions per 100 000 people)*(-1). Same as figure 1 but emphasizes differently.
Figure 3. Histogram of execution densities.
Table 1. Data the images are based on.
Edit: Added Figure 3.
What about a histogram of the values? I can’t visualize outright whether the distribution is even, Gaussian, long-tailed, two-peaked. or something else. That would be interesting info & quick to add.
Would also be interesting to see some more analysis of how the US compares to the others. On a quick look it looks to be sort of “average”.
There aren’t enough values to make a good histogram, but added as requested.
Heavily long-tailed in any case, with Iran in a class of its own. I’m not sure how reliable the official statistics are, but this is interesting. It looks like many countries use executions as almost a formality (maybe 1-3 per year), while others use it as a real part of the punishment arsenal.