Denver Post reporters Miles Moffeit and Kevin Simpson did a signal service with their four-part series on the state’s flawed juvenile justice system this week. But their tales of teenagers sentenced to life without parole chronicle just part of the human and financial cost of our legislature’s habit of valuing bombast over reality in Colorado’s Draconian sentencing laws.
I started covering the legislature for The Post in 1973, as lawmakers were voicing concern because felons often received widely disparate sentences for similar crimes – with blacks often getting harsher treatment than whites.
The late state Rep. Anne Gorsuch, R-Denver, who would later serve President Reagan as director of the Environmental Protection Agency, led the effort to reduce disparity in sentences. Sadly, her original, defensible reforms later degenerated into a race to ever-stiffer sentences.
In 1973, a life sentence in Colorado meant a prisoner had to serve 10 years before applying for parole. That parole wasn’t automatic, but the authorities could at least look at the circumstances of a given case. The mid-’70s reforms doubled the minimum time for “lifers” to 20 years before they could even apply for parole. A later change doubled minimum time again, to 40 years. Finally, the legislature set life sentences to exclude even the possibility of parole.
A similar pattern of doubling and redoubling sentences for lesser offences triggered a boom in prison construction. Colorado now has about 18,300 men and 2,100 women in prison, and the total continues to rise much faster than our population. Corrections officials estimate we will need to build a new 800-bed prison each year into the indefinite future just to warehouse all the inmates – a huge burden on state taxpayers.
The prison crowding problems stem from two blindspots in the legislature. On the budget front, the problem is that most politicians consider the “long term” as the next election. Increases in sentences are not retroactive, so increasing the minimum incarceration for, say, selling drugs from five to 10 years won’t cost any extra money before the next election. But Draconian sentences passed in the ’70s and ’80s are now burdening taxpayers even as a new generation of politicians pounds its podiums and brags about being “tough on crime.”
Even worse is the habit of judge-bashing legislators to take discretion away from the courts with mandatory minimum sentences. In truth, such sentences don’t take discretion out of the justice system, they just shift it from the person best trained to exercise it – the trial judge – to elected prosecutors. That’s because prosecutors have wide discretion about what charges to file. Any fan of “Law and Order” has watched as murder charges are bargained down to “man one” (TV talk for first-degree manslaughter) in return for a guilty plea.
In Colorado, advocates for youthful criminals argue a “perfect storm” now sends teenage killers to prison with no hope of parole. That’s because prosecutors have unbridled authority to try serious offenders over age 14 as adults and both Colorado’s felony murder law and first-degree murder laws dictate a minimum sentence of life without parole.
Some of today’s reformers assail the felony murder law. Personally, I’m quite comfortable with the theory of the law, which holds people responsible for crimes they set in motion as well as those they commit directly. But marrying such a defensible theory to a Draconian sentence of life without parole and then applying it to juveniles for crimes committed when they were as young as 14 is going too far.
In response to the Post’s series, state Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, and Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, suggested giving juveniles a shot at parole after they have served 40 years. Gordon later said he wanted to “spur debate” about whether youthful offenders could seek release even earlier.
Fair enough. I’ll say that juveniles convicted of murder should be eligible for parole after serving 20 years – the original minimum set for all offenders in the ’70s reforms. If teenage criminals can keep their noses clean for 20 years, they ought to at least be considered for a fresh start as they enter middle age.
Bob Ewegen is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He has written on state and local government since 1963.
