Is Samuel Rodriguez against the death penalty?

When I posted about evangelicals and the death penalty the other day, I didn't note Samuel Rodriguez's piece at Time. Not because he's a controversial figure, but because the piece doesn't go very far: while evangelicals should be outraged by "the details" of how Clayton Lockett died, it's clear Stephanie Neiman's killer "needed to be permanently removed from" society (an artfully ambiguous phrase). They should be outraged by these details "regardless of how you feel about the death penalty." And how does Rodriguez himself feel about it? He's studiously noncommittal, that's how.

I'm noting it now because yesterday, Morgan Lee posted an article in which Rodriguez elaborates on his own piece. Not as much as Lee suggests in his lede; Rodriguez hasn't quite "called on Evangelicals to consider whether the death penalty fully recognizes the Imago Dei (Image of God) in the perpetrator." Instead, Rodriguez persists in using language that might plausibly imply opposition to the death penalty generally, but always in the context of outrage at specific details. Lee eventually acknowledges that Rodriguez "claimed several times he was not interested in making his own convictions known at this time on the issue."

Yes, we noticed that.