He ran a good Olympics, but

doesn't the Governor of Massachusetts have better initiatives to work on than reinstating the death penalty after 21 years without it? Aside from the issue of whether the state should be in the business of putting its own people to death, which gets almost no attention, there is the recognized concern about killing those who are actually innocent. Romney assures us that

To the extent that is humanly possible, this would not ever result in a questionable execution.

because of new provisions, including (to paraphrase the NYT) requiring "conclusive scientific evidence," like DNA or fingerprints (also a longer New Yorker article), linking defendants to crimes and allowing a death penalty to be imposed only if a sentencing jury finds there is "no doubt" about a defendant's guilt, a standard that is stricter than "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Chilling quote of the day:

"It's better than nothing, and right now you got nothing" in Massachusetts, said Kent Scheiddeger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group in Sacramento.

The article (somewhat paraphrased) continues:

James S. Liebman, a Columbia University law professor who studies the death penalty and is personally opposed to it (said) "if you want to reduce the amount of risk that the sentence poses to the execution of innocent people and other kinds of injustices, this is the way you would do it." But he said Mr. Romney's proposal would be very expensive, with the cost of extra lawyers and commissions and juries, and would result in few death sentences. "Do you want to spend tens of millions every year when what you might get is one execution every 15 years?" he asked.

Mr. Romney said spending money on his plan would be a "high priority" because he believes that such a system would "have a deterrent effect and will save lives." Opponents said his plan would not deter murderers. State Representative Michael E. Festa, a Democrat, noted that Mr. Romney said his law would apply to a case like the recent courthouse killings in Atlanta. "Georgia is a death penalty state," Mr. Festa said, "and the man who committed that crime was not at all deterred by the death penalty statute."

I realize that's a heavy note to end the week on, but I'm confident that there's enough frivolity on this site for you to deal with it.