Colorado’s Senate has for the second time this week postponed its floor debate
on a bill to repeal the death penalty. The vote is rescheduled for April 1,
after lawmakers iron out the state budget over the next 11 days.
Passage of the bill seemed certain in the Democratic-controlled legislature
until the past week and a half, when a few Senate Democrats quietly signaled
they may not be supporting it.
“It’s close, very close,” Sen. Angela Williams, D-Denver, told The Independent.
Williams and others working to abolish capital punishment cite, among other
reasons, studies showing it doesn’t deter violent crime; the high cost of
taxpayer-funded legal work, and racial inequities in how capital cases are
prosecuted in Colorado. African-Americans make up 4 % of Colorado’s population,
yet all three of the state’s death-row inmates are black. Supporters of the
death penalty have argued this session that the question of repeal should be
referred to voters. Gov. Jared Polis has said would sign a repeal bill and
would commute the sentences of the 3 death row inmates to life in prison.
2 of the 3, Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray, were convicted and sentenced to die
for the 2005 murders of Javad Marshall Fields and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe,
days before Fields was scheduled to testify against Ray in connection with
another murder case. Fields’ mother, Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, is the most
high-profile opponent of repeal and has been working with district attorneys in
trying to persuade her state Senate colleagues to stand by her in that
position.
Fields, who is African American, dismisses concerns that prosecutors in
Colorado have disproportionately targeted black defendants with capital
prosecution. She says there’s “nothing relevant” about the color of their skin.
“What those death row inmates have in common is that they’re all murderers.
Race has nothing to do with this,” she told The Independent earlier this week.
The state Senate is the main hurdle for the repeal bill because the House has a
wider margin of Democratic control and is considered more liberal.
Senate Democrats who support repeal have been especially quiet this week,
declining to comment publicly as they seek to balance respect for Fields –
their assistant majority leader – and her family with objections to what they
say is an inhumane and outdated state law. Colorado hasn’t carried out a death
sentence since the 1997 execution of convicted murderer Gary Davis by lethal
injection.
Conspicuously silent, at least publicly, is Senate President Leroy Garcia,
D-Pueblo, who notably didn’t sponsor the repeal bill and who has not made clear
where he stands on the issue. Garcia hasn’t responded to our inquiries.
Source: The Colorado Independent, March 21, 2019
Hickenlooper on the death penalty: "I’m against it. It makes no sense."
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said Wednesday that he is fully against the death penalty and would suspend it, if elected president.
“I’m against it,” Hickenlooper said.
“It makes no sense. It’s not a deterrent. It’s expensive. It prolongs misery. And the worst thing is it is depending on where that crime occurs, and in many cases, whether the killer is African-American or Latino, that has a lot to do with who gets tried on a death penalty charge. And the random injustice of that is something that this country should never stand for.”
CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether Hickenlooper would halt all of the federal executions as President.
“I have not looked at all the cases, but the vast majority of cases in the federal death penalty system, I’d have to be suspicious just to start,” he said. “So, I certainly would suspend the death penalty. ”
Source: CNN, March 21, 2019
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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
