With a new governor and a Democratic-controlled House and Senate, legislators are set to propose a bill to abolish the death penalty in Colorado.
Fort Collins Rep. Jeni Arndt, D-Fort Collins, said she's working on a bill in the state House to abolish the death penalty, with support from Democratic Rep. Adrienne Benavidez from Commerce City.
Arndt, who will continue to represent Fort Collins House District 53 after putting her name in to fill Sen. John Kefalas' seat in the state Senate, said she can't speak to the bill's specifics yet, but the bill has been proposed several times in the General Assembly and failed, so she's trying again.
For Arndt, her faith plays a factor in why she opposes the death penalty, but she also believes that the death penalty is discriminatory and unevenly applied based on race — pointing to the fact that all the inmates on Colorado's death row are black.
She said she remembers asking her mom at only 5 years old why "the government killed people."
"She didn't have a good answer," Arndt said.
The high-profile case of Colorado man Christopher Watts — who pleaded guilty to killing his pregnant wife and two daughters but did not face the death penalty — brought discussion of the state’s capital punishment back to the forefront this fall. And two weeks ago, 17th Judicial District Attorney Dave Young filed his notice of intent to seek the death penalty in the shooting death of Adams County Sheriff’s Deputy Heath Gumm.
Democratic Governor-elect Jared Polis said if the Colorado General Assembly were to send him a bill either ending or phasing out the death penalty, he would be happy to sign it.
Polis believes the death penalty will be phased out on both a state and national level, though he said he's unsure if it'll be in five years, 10 or even 20.
Currently, Colorado is one of 30 states that allow capital punishment.
The governor-elect cited the case of James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured scores of others in 2012 in the Aurora theater shooting, as an example. Holmes was not sentenced to death, but others who have killed fewer people have, showing that it “seems erratic in how it’s being implemented.”
Part of the inconsistency is that different prosecutors make different decisions about capital punishment, as do different juries, Polis said.
It's up to a district attorney's office to choose to pursue the death penalty in a case, but a jury has to come to a unanimous decision on the death penalty after a guilty verdict.
There's also the problem of cost, Polis said. A study published in the University of Denver Criminal Law showed that death penalty cases took almost four years longer to resolve than life-without-parole cases.
That same study cites an opinion piece by former Boulder County district attorney Stan Garnett, who said prosecuting a death penalty case can cost the prosecution more than $1 million in addition to costs incurred by the judiciary and the defense counsel, "which is almost always funded with taxpayer funds." The study asserts that this number is too low, but the dollar figures are imprecise and anecdotal.
Arndt said cost is the third reason she's pursuing the bill, though it's not her primary motivating factor.
Ultimately, "I think (the death penalty is) just cruel," she said, adding that often inmates stay on death row for long periods of time.
In the Watts case, Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke said he didn’t seek the death penalty mainly because of the “strong wishes” of victim Shanann Watts’ family, but it also helped him reach a plea agreement in the case.
Neither Rourke nor his predecessor Ken Buck, now a U.S. congressman, sought the death penalty while serving as Weld County District attorney. The county’s last capital murder case was in 2002.
“The reality of the death penalty in Colorado is it is exceedingly difficult, even if the jury imposes a death sentence, for it to be carried out,” Rourke said.
The most recent death row inmate, Nathan Dunlap, convicted of killing four people in a Chuck E. Cheese in Aurora in 1993, was scheduled to be executed in 2013. Gov. John Hickenlooper granted him a temporary reprieve from execution, though he did not grant him clemency.
Eighteenth Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler tried the 2012 Aurora theater shooting case and called Colorado's death penalty statutes the “toughest in the United States of America.” He said the standards to impose it are even more difficult than those federal cases are subject to, such as in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing.
After all the facts were determined in the Holmes case and the defendant had been found guilty, the death penalty decision came down to “individual reasoned moral judgement.” One juror opposed the death penalty on moral grounds, and a unanimous consensus is required.
“We make it very intensely personal, and that’s where you lose people,” Brauchler said.
Brauchler said he believes the governor’s office has politicized capital punishment in the state.
Though Hickenlooper did not provide the Coloradoan with an interview for this story, his staff released a statement on his behalf that said because the death penalty is the “most absolute punishment that exists,” it needs to be almost perfect.
“It is not,” the statement reads. “The death penalty isn’t cost-effective. It does not stop the suffering of victims’ families. It doesn’t deter crime. A death penalty system must operate flawlessly, and ours doesn’t.”
The statement goes on to say that the “inconsistent and imperfect application” of capital punishment renders it useless.
But Brauchler disputes those arguments, saying if legislators trusted the voters, they would do what Hickenlooper has previously suggested and ask the voters to decide on the death penalty rather than pass legislation to end it.
And Brauchler believes Colorado citizens will vote to keep it.
Arndt, however, said voters selected their representatives. If residents wanted to make it a ballot issue, they could do that through a citizen referendum.
The potential cost-savings of an end to the death penalty, according to Brauchler, are “nonsense.” He said there are cost savings when people plead guilty to life without parole, and what makes the death penalty cases so expensive are the years of appeals and uncertainties, such as in the Dunlap case.
“This is all an effort to continue to whittle away at sanctions against people who commit the worst crimes in our community,” he said.
Rourke, meanwhile, isn’t looking for easy fixes to Colorado’s statutes or to make imposing the death penalty easier. Rather, he wants to make it “more functional” to be imposed and carried out.
But he thinks cost should be one of the last factors anybody considers when determining the fate of someone who took the lives of others and committed a horrific crime, calling it a “callous, cold, inappropriate consideration when trying to make that incredible decision.”
“We don’t seek it because it’s inexpensive. We don’t seek it because it’s expensive,” he said.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde