EDITORIALS: Colorado Newspapers Support Bill to Repeal Death Penalty

As Colorado’s Senate Judiciary Committee considers SB 95—a bill that would replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole—the editorial boards of The Denver Post and The Durango Herald have urged the legislature to end capital punishment in the state. Colorado’s death penalty system “is broken beyond repair and needs to be repealed,” wrote The Denver Post​​. Repeal, it said, “would save the state millions in both the prosecution and defense of murderers and an untold number of judicial man hours that have so infrequently resulted in death.” The Post editorial also highlighted the unwillingness of Colorado juries to impose death sentences, noting that the highly-publicized capital cases of James Holmes and Dexter Lewis both resulted in life sentences. The Durango Herald editorial board also called for repeal, agreeing with the arguments advanced by Republican legislators in the neighboring mountain states of Utah and Nevada that the death penalty “is a failed public policy, is a waste of taxpayer dollars, the risk of executing innocent people is too high and it causes unnecessary harm to victims’ families.” The Herald editorial also emphasized the high cost of capital punishment—quoting estimates by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado “that the average death penalty trial costs $3.5 million, compared to $150,000 for a trial for life without parole”—and that Colorado has had only one execution in 50 years. In 2013, citing arbitrariness and unfairness in the application of the state’s death penalty, Governor John W. Hickenlooper granted a reprieve to Nathan Dunlop, one of three men on Colorado’s death row. A 2015 study published in the University of Denver Law Review subsequently showed that prosecutorial decisions to seek the death penalty in Colorado “depend[] to an alarming extent on the race and geographic location of the defendant.” All of Colorado’s death-row prisoners are African-American men from the municipality of Aurora. SB 95 would apply prospectively to future crimes, but would not affect the cases of the prisoners currently on death row. [UPDATE: After holding hearings on SB 95, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 3-2 to defeat the bill. The vote effectively ends death penalty repeal efforts in the state for the 2017 legislative session.]

(Editorial, “Repeal Colorado’s flawed and broken death penalty,” The Denver Post, February 14, 2017; Editorial, “Colorado should join mountain movement to end the death penalty,” The Durango Herald, February 13, 2017.) See Editorials and Recent Legislative Activity.