Once again on the death penalty, sort of

An 18-year-old Iranian woman has just been sentenced to death for stabbing one of the three rapists who attacked her and her 16-year-old niece. She was 17 at the time of the crime, too.

Sheesh, and I thought that Finland is harsh on self-defense... And of course I realize that she might be lying, but so far nobody seems to be even arguing against her self-defense story.

Today California executed Clarence Ray Allen, a blind old man and a murderer of four. This fine senior citizen has ordered an accomplice to kill his son's girlfriend so that she would not tell police of a grocery store robbery Allen and his gang did. While serving a life sentence for this murder, Allen has ordered the murders of four witnesses who had testified against him, and three of them actually were murdered.

BTW, a question to the opponents of death penalty (I can answer for myself that I don't know): how to you propose to deal with people who commit murder while already serving life without parole? Especially with those who try to eliminate the witnesses (lawyers, judges, police officers, etc.) who had something to do with their case?

But this is not the point. What I really want to know is why Finnish and other Western media pay so much more attention to Allen's case than to that of the young Iranian woman? This phenomenon can be easily explained by people's dislike of the US (a lot of people leap at any chance to criticize anything the US does) or by people's contempt for Iran and Iranian justice (nobody really expects any better from them), but I'd like to know to which degree both factors influence it, and how large is the influence of the Schwarzenegger and Tookie publicity.