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 Colorado’s death penal­ty sys­tem ​“is bro­ken beyond repair and needs to be repealed,” wrote The Denver Post​.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.

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