Death Penalty News

Juries in recent years have failed to agree on the death penalty in some gruesome cases, including mass killings at a Parkland, Florida high school and an Aurora, Colorado movie theater. Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray has announced that he is seeking the death penalty for Tyler Robinson, the man accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk. This decision significantly raises the stakes for prosecutors. While they believe they have a strong case to prove Robinson's guilt, a death sentence is far from guaranteed. To secure it, prosecutors must convince every member of a 12-person jury to unanimously agree that the death penalty is the appropriate punishment for the crime.

Former Denver Chief Deputy District Attorney Craig Silverman recently wrote about why he changed his mind about supporting the death penalty and expressed new fears regarding its future use.  His op-ed was published on August 29, 2023 in the Colorado Sun.  Mr. Silverman writes that capital punishment was a prominent issue in his campaign for Denver District Attorney, and he himself prosecuted death penalty cases and publicly supported its use. But he writes that he now has “newfound support for abolishing capital punishment” for reasons he characterizes as “personal.”

"There were explicit warnings. Two students told an assistant principal the year before the tragedy that Cruz might hurt others and even shoot up the school." The most vicious killer in South Florida history will spend the rest of his life in prison for the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018. “You will not come out until you are no longer alive,” Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer told Nikolas Cruz Wednesday before accepting his guilty pleas at a hearing in Fort Lauderdale. The only remaining question is whether Florida will put him to death by lethal injection or commit him to live out his life in prison. The punishment will be for 12 jurors to decide next year, following the 34 guilty pleas Cruz entered — 17 for first-degree murder and 17 more for the attempted first-degree murder of victims who were shot but survived. RELATED |  Parkland Massacre Shooter Nikolas Cruz Pleads Guilty—But Could Still Get Death Penalty There are good reasons why the ...

The Colorado legislature has debated getting rid of capital punishment four times since 2000. The bill being brought this year wouldn’t send the question to voters, as proponents of lethal injection want. Democrats are pushing to abolish the death penalty in Colorado for the 5th time in a dozen years, reviving a conversation that has ebbed and flowed for more than a decade at the Capitol but which now appears to have more momentum toward passage than ever before. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, supports abolition and his party controls the state’s House and Senate. Those 3 factors, which have not lined up for at least the past 2 decades, give the measure an open lane toward becoming law. But capital punishment is a moral question on which public opinion is ever-shifting and crosses party lines. 2 prominent Democrats in the Colorado General Assembly this year are the closest in the statehouse to the issue and are also among the death penalty’s most compelling advocates. ...

If the worth of a public policy is its ability to achieve policy objectives, then capital punishment is a failure. It hasn't been shown to deter crime. It's not cost-effective. It's unevenly applied. It needs to be abolished. Colorado abolished the death penalty in 1897 for four years, but subsequent repeal efforts have fallen short of success. In 2009 a repeal bill failed by just one vote in the Colorado Senate after passing in the House. Abolition advocates hope that 2019 is the year when Colorado can finally relegate capital punishment to history. There is growing public revulsion with the practice, its value to justice is increasingly dubious, and the political circumstances are as favorable to repeal as ever — abolition-leaning Democrats control the Colorado House and Senate, the state's new attorney general, Democrat Phil Weiser, is opposed to the death penalty, and new Gov. Jared Polis, also a Democrat, has said he would sign a repeal bill. The momentu...

“You know, the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.” Over the last year, President Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasized the death penalty in televised speeches, statements, and tweets. Sometimes, it was invoked in reference to certain groups, like drug dealers; other times, the president applied it to a specific individual, as he did just after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. Trump’s infatuation with the death penalty isn’t new. Even before his foray into politics, he tweeted about cases where he thought capital punishment would be appropriate. He called for it when Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl made headlines for being captured after he deserted his post in Afghanistan and in the cases of the Boston Marathon bomber and the Aurora shooter. In comparison, a search of Barack Obama’s Twitter archive finds zero results for the words “death penalty.” More famously, in 1985, Trump bought $85,000 in ads that called for the execution of the Central Par...

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 wh...

District Attorney Michael Rourke has yet to make a decision as to whether to push for the death penalty in the case of Chris Watts, the 33-year-old Colorado man who stands accused of 3 counts of 1st-degree murder and 1 felony count of unlawful termination of a pregnancy. What's the background? Police charged Chris Watts with the felonies after his wife Shanann - who was 15 weeks pregnant with the couple's 3rd child - disappeared along with the couple's 3- and 4-year-old daughters. Shanann returned home to Frederick, Colorado, from a business trip in the early hours of Aug. 13. Upon her return, the couple reportedly held an emotional conversation about the status of their marriage. During the conversation, Chris Watts reportedly told his wife that he no longer wanted to be married. Local police performed a welfare check on Shanann and her young daughters after the 34-year-old mother didn't show up for a 1:30 p.m. doctor's appointment. Just 1 da...

After more than 2 months of jury selection, testimony in El Paso County's 1st death penalty trial in a decade is about to get underway. Opening statements at the double-murder trial of former Fort Carson soldier Glen Law Galloway are expected to begin at 9 a.m. Monday. His trial is expected to last 6 weeks - followed by several more weeks for a penalty phase should he be found guilty. Galloway, 46, a 1-time helicopter mechanic who later worked for Atmel Corp., a Colorado Springs semiconductor manufacturer, faces multiple counts of first-degree murder in the May 2016 slayings of his ex-girlfriend, Janice Nam, and a homeless man named Marcus Anderson. The 2 were fatally shot on consecutive days in May 2016, several months after Galloway cut off an ankle monitor and went into hiding. The case is expected to serve as a test of whether El Paso County prosecutors can succeed where others in Colorado have fallen short: Persuading a panel to impose death. In 2015, 2 ...