In a sometimes emotional hearing Monday evening at the statehouse, families of murder victims, former prosecutors and religious groups argued for repealing the death penalty.
Four hours into the packed hearing, the House Judiciary Committee had just started hearing from those in favor of keeping capital punishment — a group that also included prosecutors and families of murder victims.
House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, is sponsoring HB 1274, which would repeal the death penalty. Murder cases would still be aggressively tried, but the high expense of a death-penalty trial would be avoided. The money saved would be diverted to investigating cold homicide cases.
“You can debate the morals (of the death penalty) forever,” Weissmann said. “You can debate the question of deterrence forever.”
But what can’t be debated is the cost savings from not pursuing the death penalty, which Weissmann estimated to be millions of dollars each year. A legislative analysis, though, estimated the figure at $369,041 a year, a sum Weissmann said was far too low.
Weissmann sponsored a similar bill last year, but it narrowly failed on the House floor. The lawmaker, however, became House majority leader this year, an influential position that could give the measure more weight if it makes it to the floor.
Thirteen states have abolished the death penalty, and in eight other states, there is either a moratorium or de facto ban on executions.
Proponents of the bill, which included the crying relatives of murder victims, said there were more than 1,400 homicide cases that had not been solved. They said the resources now used to put prisoners to death would be better spent hunting down killers still walking the streets.
Richard Bloch, a former Arapahoe County prosecutor and now a criminal defense attorney, said death-penalty cases consume an enormous amount of resources in the legal system.
“I can tell you that the death penalty, in my opinion, is morally wrong and has no effect” on deterring crime, he said.
But Rep. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, a member of the committee and a career police officer, disagreed.
“How do we find justice for the Timothy McVeighs and Ted Bundys of the world that are just cold-blooded killers?” King asked.
“It is not justice to take a life for a life,” Bloch replied. “The justice system is not there to heal people.”
Attorney General John Suthers argued that some crimes are so heinous that life imprisonment without parole is “an inadequate societal response.”
He reminded lawmakers that the legislature had repealed the death penalty once before, in 1897. Three years later — after four inmates killed a prison guard and escaped, and an angry mob hung one the prisoners from a light pole — lawmakers reinstated capital punishment.
