The father of one of Nathan Dunlap’s victims was glad the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction and death sentence of the Chuck E. Cheese killer, but he wishes the case wasn’t taking so long.
“We’ve gone through ‘one step closer’ about a half dozen times now,” Bob Crowell said Monday. “I don’t know what ‘one step closer’ is anymore.”
His daughter, Sylvia Crowell, was 19 on Dec. 14, 1993, when Dunlap shot her at the Aurora restaurant along with three others: Ben Grant, 17; Colleen O’Connor, 17; and Margaret Kohlberg, 50.
Monday, the court denied Dunlap’s appeal and ordered that a date be set for his execution.
Phil Cherner, one of Dunlap’s appellate attorneys, said Dunlap will continue his appeals.
“Mr. Dunlap will seek a stay of execution while he requests the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling,” Cherner said. “We will also seek relief in the federal courts if necessary.”
Legal analysts said that it will probably be another two to four years before all appeals are exhausted.
Jim Peters, the former Arapahoe County district attorney who prosecuted Dunlap, said he still supports the death penalty in Colorado.
“I strongly support the death penalty in appropriate cases where the facts are horrendous,” Peters said. “This was a ghastly case that had no sensibility to it.”
Peters would like to see the state system streamlined so the appeals process doesn’t take so long.
“It is hard on the families of the victims and on the entire system,” Peters said. “It seems the process is much longer than it needs to be.”
But David Lane, a Denver defense attorney, said the length of time it has taken speaks to the unfairness and futility of the death penalty.
“This is symptomatic of a system that is broken,” Lane said. “It is just further evidence that the system is not a workable system.”
Dunlap had claimed that he had not received adequate representation from his lawyers during the trial.
A lower court had ruled that Dunlap’s two trial attorneys performed deficiently by failing to conduct an adequate mental health mitigation investigation and by failing to object to a portion of the prosecution’s penalty phase closing argument.
However, the Supreme Court’s ruling, written by Justice Nancy Rice, said Dunlap had been effectively represented.
Crowell said events still keep his daughter’s death fresh. On Monday, for example, a Gateway High School student who was in Sylvia Crowell’s Sunday school class received a college scholarship in Crowell’s honor.
“We have tried to move on a little bit,” Crowell said, “but that’s not possible because there are things that remind us of the fact that it happened, like the fact that Nathan Dunlap is still not executed.”
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
