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Suppose you are an anti-death penalty extremist*, and you view the death penalty as state sponsored murder. Perhaps you would accept ten free-range murders to prevent one state-sponsored one, perhaps you try to keep the sum as low as possible and think that the expected number of murders a acquitted murderer will commit post-release is smaller than one.
The honest thing to do would be to campaign against the death penalty. The clever thing to do would be to find what people hate most about the death penalty, and emphasize that.
One thing people generally seem to hate are torturous executions, and there are certainly activists making hay with that: whatever method one might care to propose, someone will certainly describe it as cruel or brutal.
Another thing the population does not like is if innocent people are executed. Thus anything which increases the public's estimate of the fraction of innocents on death row will also decrease support for the death penalty.
The low hanging fruits are people on death row who are actually innocent, and getting them freed through DNA evidence is good work. But you don't have an infinite supply of these. So you expand your scope to people who might be innocent. In a strict anti-death-penalty world view, getting a guilty man out is still net positive: not only do you prevent once action you consider murder, but you also increase the perceived base rate of innocents ('not proven' might be more accurate) on death row, thereby eroding support for the death penalty.
Then there is signaling value to be considered. There is little signaling value in believing a woman's rape accusation if it is backed by video evidence: anyone with any politics would agree with you. By contrast the signaling value of publicly stating that you believe accusations not backed by evidence made by a woman who has lied under oath before is much higher, because it is a costly signal for outgroup members to send. Likewise, it could be that anti-death-penalty activists might get into a #BelieveDeathRowInmates competition where getting acquitted clients who seem more obviously guilty has stronger signaling value.
Even if the activists fail to get an acquittal or a stay of execution, they still win, because it was not never about that one convict in the first place. If you get the media to report the execution as controversial, that will cause the general population to update towards p(innocent|death row)=0.5, which is good enough. By contrast, defending someone in a jury trial successfully is much less effective, because it reinforces the message 'the system works: innocents get acquitted', which is not the message you want to send.
One can debate if the Innocence Project contains anti death penalty activists, and especially such activists who would prefer a murderer to walk free (after a few decades) to them being executed. The Wikipedia page is rather positive. Of course, it also says:
I have not studied the OJ Simpson case in enough details to have my own opinion on it, but from what I have read, the accuracy of the verdict is at least contested, and the defense certainly went above and beyond to get an acquittal. So a cynic might suggest renaming it to 'The Innocent like OJ Project'. On the other hand, they also have spent a lot of effort on clearing the name of people not on death row through DNA evidence, so painting them as 'always chaotic evil' seems wrong as well.
[*] As an European, I am generally anti-death-penalty. I find it barbaric, ridiculously expensive when implemented with proper safeguards (think US, not Iran), distasteful. But I don't oppose it to the point where I would prefer murderers to walk free to getting killed, so I find myself on the same side of the fence as death penalty enthusiasts opposed by my hypothetical radical activists.
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