It was political cowardice, pure and simple.
All of a sudden, everyone at the state Capitol is madly in love with the death penalty.
You would need packs of the finest bloodhounds to uncover any trace of the original House Bill 1274, which would have done away with Colorado’s almost-never-used and fiscally outrageous death penalty, and paid for investigators to track down the scores of people who have gotten away for decades with murder.
I have seen livid legislators before, but never like Tuesday.
House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, the Louisville Democrat who has tried for four years to rid the state of the death penalty, was spitting fire, the blue-flame variety you cannot see.
“What the Senate did on Monday was done solely to skirt a vote (on the death penalty),” he said. “What they did doesn’t do a damn thing to solve cold murder cases.”
He was referring to Monday’s rewrite of HB 1274 that keeps the death penalty in place but provides an alternative funding source to investigate the state’s 1,434 unsolved murder cases.
It basically creates a state fund that any Colorado police department can apply to tap, if it is of a mind of revisit a murder case it can’t solve.
Weissmann and other supporters of the bill want a centralized, eight-person cold- case unit that uses the millions the state expends on death-penalty cases to help police departments close their unsolved murders.
He was in contact early Tuesday with Sen. Morgan Carroll, the bill’s Senate sponsor. What should their next steps be?
They agreed the $2.50 that traffic and other low-level offenders would be charged through the amendment to pay for the cold-case fund was nonsense.
“No,” Weissmann said Tuesday morning. “I want to force a vote on the death penalty itself. Up or down.”
Carroll, too, was nearly beside herself.
“Hopefully, we are going to reject the garbage put in last night, go to conference committee and put this to a proper vote,” she said.
Lois Tochtrop is one of the brightest, most thoughtful and hardest-working members of the Senate. She was among the handful of Democrats who rammed the amendment through.
Her constituents, she said, were dead-set against doing away with the death penalty.
“I put a lot and a lot of thought into that vote, probably as much as I have on any piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my career. But when I hear from my constituents, the people who voted for me, I back them.”
Tochtrop even acknowledged that if she found herself on a death-penalty-case jury, she could never add her voice to those who wanted to kill the defendant.
Sometimes leadership means telling those you represent — no matter how many times they call or e-mail — there is a better way, a moral way.
And sometimes, in service to your district, state or country, there comes a moment when you have to reach into your gut and do what may not get you elected the next time.
Now, I’ve never run for office, but I can assure you that if I got booted out for doing what my heart, my mind and my morality told me was the right thing to do, I would kick back in retirement and in my La-Z-Boy with the biggest grin on my face you ever saw.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
