I saw the other day that the senator was rethinking his support for it. I thought that was a good thing, and wondered if it had something to do with the fact that the Democrats are running a pro-lifer against him. But I missed this bit from the March 24 Philadelphia Daily News: Santorum “cited as the reason for rethinking his stance the fact that DNA testing has shown that a number of Death Row inmates–119 so far–were innocent of the murder they were convicted for and were subsequently released. ‘It’s more DNA issues than anything else,’ he said.” This is a terrible reason to be against the death penalty.

For one thing, it isn’t true that 119 innocents have been freed from Death Row. The source of the claim is the Death Penalty Information Center–and, as as I’ve tried to show here and here, it counts plenty of people as “innocent” who almost certainly committed the crimes for which they were charged but were released on technicalities. Second, not even DPIC claims that all 119 people released from death row were released because of DNA evidence.

Third, I don’t think the argument from the possibility of error is all as strong as people appear to believe it is (a position I tried to explain toward the end of this piece).