"The last fail-safe for white supremacy"

Andrew Gelman is a political scientist, a numbers guy. I think of him as the epitome of the desire of some in the academy to demonstrate their distance from the squishes in the humanities. So I listen up when I encounter him writing something like this:

My larger perspective on the death penalty, informed by my research with Jim Liebman several years ago, is that you can only accept capital punishment if you’re willing to have innocent people executed every now and then. And, the more effective you want the death penalty to be, the more innocents you have to execute.

The occasional execution of innocent people might be deemed ok in some settings—-they shoot deserters in wartime, and if a country is in the midst of a big enough crime wave, I could see people accepting the need for the occasional lethal mistake of the judicial process. My point here is just that if you want to execute people on a regular basis, you’re gonna make some mistakes. We saw this in our research on death-sentencing reversals, which were not merely the actions of a few liberal court panels.

American Prospect

Is that really okay, especially since we can imagine who are going to be the unfortunate innocents?