Laura Meckler reports in the WSJ:

Hillary Clinton said Wednesday she doesn't support abolishing the death penalty but would like to see it used more judiciously, another point of contrast with the most liberal members of her party and with her nearest rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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"We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied and very unfortunately, often times in a discriminatory way," she said during a question-and-answer session at a "Politics and Eggs" luncheon at St. Anselm College on Wednesday. She said she welcomed efforts by many states to revisit their policies.

"I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve consideration of the death penalty, but I'd like to see those be very limited and rare," she said.

What evidence is there that it "has been too frequently applied"?  On the contrary, it is applied to only a tiny fraction of intentional criminal homicides.  All you have to do is read the facts of capital cases, like the Correll case discussed in my previous post, to know these sentences are thoroughly deserved and entirely just in nearly all cases.

The old discrimination claim that black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death has been refuted time after time for decades now, even by the opponents' own studies.  The claim that the death penalty is less likely to be imposed if the victim is black would, if valid, be a claim that the death penalty is not imposed often enough.  But the claim is not valid, as explained in my OSJCL article.

Given the state of the Democratic Party today, Mrs. Clinton is under fire for not going far enough in the soft-on-crime direction.

Her position is, I suspect, calibrated for maximum political gain.  She believes, with justification, that the nomination is pretty much in the bag, and she is looking to the general election.