The Gray Lady's Got No Juice

Notwithstanding its significance, as alleged by Brooks, the NYT endorsement of Leslie Crocker Snyder for Manhanttan DA didn't matter much.  The Old Man, Robert M. Morgenthau, won handily, garnering almost 60% of the vote.  As I was reading the coverage, I noted Snyder's odd position on the death penalty, which became an issue during the last few days:

In the closing days of the campaign, the emphasis shifted to the death penalty, which Mr. Morgenthau has long opposed. Ms. Snyder said repeatedly that if capital punishment were legal in New York State, which at the moment it is not, she would impose it only for what she calls the most serious crimes, and only if there were corroborating evidence like DNA.

This tends to be an increasingly familiar (and superficially plausible) position, taken in the contemporary legal academy for instance -- though only?  -- by New York Law School's Robert Blecker, who says executions should be imposed on only the worst of the worst offenders.  But what's odd about Snyder's request for a requirement of "corroborating evidence like DNA" is that it may presuppose that DNA evidence is never mistakenly or corruptly handled.  As my recent article on the retributivist case against the death penalty explains in greater detail, this is a problematic assumption.  Moreover, if a person is convicted of a capital crime, it means there was already a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, i.e., that there was "corroborating evidence."  Perhaps one shouldn't put essentially political figures like the Manhattan DA under such scrutiny, because they're just blathering, and maybe in the words of one favorite commentator on this blog, "stupid."   Still, I suspect that politicians who support the death penalty (as punishment) have to be willing to accept a non-zero error rate, even though they may reasonably try to devise schemes to reduce the error rate.