DENVER—A House committee approved a plan Monday to eliminate the death penalty and use the money to focus on cold cases after victims’ relatives asked for help finding closure.
The House Judiciary Committee approved the measure (House Bill 1274) after hours of emotional testimony from supporters who said the money could be better spent finding the people who killed their loved ones. The bill now goes to the Appropriations Committee.
The legislation would shift funds currently used to prosecute death-penalty cases to deal with the growing backlog of more than 1,400 unsolved homicides that have stymied local investigators since 1970.
House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, a Democrat from Louisville, said the state should be spending money solving those cases instead of defending the only two inmates currently on death row and a half-dozen other cases that are pending. He said it’s a question of resources, not a moral debate.
“Does an eye for an eye trump thou shalt not kill? I don’t know,” Weissmann told the committee.
The two men on Colorado’s death row are Sir Marion Owens, convicted last year of gunning down two people, including a potential witness in a murder trial; and Nathan Dunlap, convicted in 1996 of murder, attempted murder and other charges for killing four people and wounding a fifth at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Aurora in December 1993.
The last execution in Colorado was in 1997, when 53-year-old Gary Lee Davis was put to death for his conviction in a 1986 slaying.
In 2007, a similar bill passed the House Judiciary Committee but lost on the House floor under intense pressure from district attorneys and the state attorney general.
Attorney General John Suthers told the committee his investigators are one of the best resources for cold cases, providing advice to investigators in half of the state’s 22 districts over the past few years. He said Colorado voters twice voted for the death penalty and they should be the ones who decide whether to eliminate it as an option for prosecutors.
Doris Espinoza, mother of 2001 victim Ricky Espinoza, whose body was found in an El Paso County landfill, told lawmakers she wonders every day what happened to her son. His sister, Jacqueline, told lawmakers that investigators have lost interest in the case and the state needs to step in.
“We’ve been abandoned,” she told the committee.
Frank Birgfeld, father of 2007 Mesa County victim Paige Birgfeld, told lawmakers his life has been in limbo since his daughter mysteriously disappeared. He said she is presumed dead by authorities, though her body has never been found.
Birgfeld said an investigator promised to pursue the case but warned that he is pursuing 58 other cases, and missing person cases can take 20 years or more.
“Give it a pair of fresh eyes,” Birgfeld told lawmakers.
