rephrase in simple terms: Governor Mitt Romney has charged a blue-ribbon commission with drafting a death-penalty law for Massachusetts that can be applied with 100 percent infallibility. The commission will not be able to do sono legal instrument can be 100 percent infalliblebut I don't blame the governor for wanting it to try. In recent years, anti-death penalty propagandists have succeeded in stoking the fear that capital punishment is being carelessly meted out. But it's a bogus accusation: Of the 875 prisoners executed in the United States in modern times, not one has been retroactively proved innocent. Widely trumpeted claims meant to illustrate the system's sloppinessthat more than 100 innocent men have been freed from Death Row, for example, or that death-penalty cases have a 68 percent error ratefall apart under scrutiny. In fact, so exacting is the due process in these cases that the death penalty in America is probably the most accurately administered criminal sanction in the world. The propaganda has taken its toll, however. Romney knows that many people who would otherwise support capital punishment now hesitate for fear it may lead to an awful miscarriage of justice. Hence his call for "a standard of proof that is incontrovertible"an uncompromising benchmark endorsed by members of the new panel. "In this work," says co-chairman Frederick Bieber, a geneticist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, "there is no room for error." That is a worthy goal, bu