Death Row News
Death Penalty News
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Lawmakers gave their initial approval Wednesday evening to a bill that would abolish Colorado’s death penalty, despite the outcry of Colorado’s top law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Suthers.
In a 7-4 vote, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill by Rep. Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, that would use the funds normally spent on death penalty cases’ mandatory appeals to create and sustain a “Cold Case Unit” at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
The newly christened unit would help local law enforcement agencies solve murders that have languished for more than a year.
Shortly before the vote, passing Weissmann’s bill to the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Debbie Stafford, R-Aurora, said lawmakers needed to make tough choices, and funding cold-case investigations was a cause worthy of losing the death penalty.
Stafford broke from her Republican peers, saying, after seven years of working on criminal justice issues, it is time to “do something differently.” She said it is time to balance the Legislature’s “tough on crime” stance with taking a new approach to criminal justice.
The votes of Stafford and her Democratic colleagues followed a vigorous, four-hour debate between death-penalty advocates, including the state’s top law enforcement officials, and nearly two dozen family members of cold-case victims.
Suthers, who provided the day’s most pointed attack on Weissmann’s bill, said the death penalty is necessary for Colorado to confront the most serious crimes, including acts of terrorism, and deter other serious crimes.
“On the basis of 30 years of experience as a lawyer, I have come to the conclusion that there are crimes for which life in prison is not an appropriate response,” Suthers said.
He said even if the death penalty is used sparingly, it needs to exist for prosecutors to deal with extreme scenarios, such as the killing of prison guards or acts of terrorism.
Suthers said he resents Weissmann’s framing of the death penalty and cold-case-investigation funding as an “either-or” proposition.
Don Quick, district attorney for the 17th Judicial District and president of Colorado District Attorney’s Council, said the abolition of the death penalty is important enough to be dealt with as its own issue.
“You ought to decide up or down on the issue,” Quick said.
Quick said if cold cases are that important, lawmakers should find the money divorced from the death penalty.
Over their objections, the death penalty took its first steps toward elimination in Colorado.
According to the Colorado Department of Corrections, it costs the state more than $37,000 a year to house inmates at the Colorado State Penitentiary, where death-row inmates are held.
Cheryl Ahumada, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said her agency does not maintain statistics specific to death-row costs.
Two men are currently sitting on death row in Colorado, 39-year-old Edward Montour, convicted in 2003 for murdering a corrections officer, and 32-year-old Nathan Dunlap, convicted in 1996 for the murder of four employees at an Aurora Chuck E Cheese’s restaurant.
Weissmann’s bill would not commute the sentences of Montour and Dunlap.
Colorado has executed one person since the Colorado General Assembly reinstated the death penalty in 1984: 53-year-old Gary Lee Davis, on Oct. 13, 1997.
According to the Department of Corrections, death-row inmates wait an average of 10 years between their convictions and executions because of mandatory appeals.
Richard Owen Drake was the last man sentenced to death in Mesa County, after he was convicted in 1983 for the stabbing death of his wife.
Drake’s sentence was overturned in 1988 after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled the trial court judge incorrectly instructed the jury.
Local defense attorney Steve Laiche said the death penalty is so expensive because the “legal system doesn’t really want to put anybody to death.”
Laiche, who successfully prosecuted five death-penalty cases while serving as a district attorney in Louisiana, said Colorado, like other states, has a complex series of automatic appeals in addition to federal legal challenges that can effectively stay an execution for more than a decade.
“They want to make sure that everything is correct, because they don’t want to have somebody come back and look at them later on and say ‘you’ve executed an innocent person,’ ” Laiche said.
Even with these projected savings of Weissmann’s bill, totaling more than $232,000 over the next two years, Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said there is little reason to overturn the death penalty from a Mesa County perspective.
“I think there is something of a disconnect in this legislation,” Hautzinger said. “It’s not inherently obvious to me that inordinate dollars are being wasted on death-penalty cases that should be funneled into cold-case investigations in my jurisdiction.”
Lt. Greg Assenmacher of the Grand Junction Police Department said his agency currently has eight unsolved homicides dating back to 1964.
Hautzinger said other local law enforcement agencies have relatively few unsolved homicide cases.
“To the extent that death-penalty cases in Colorado can be considered to be a waste of resources,” Hautzinger said, “I think a lot more of that goes to the ideological nature of the Colorado publicdefender’s office that makes values-based decisions to devote resources into defending death-penalty cases.”
Hautzinger said the death penalty has a place in prosecutors’ tool belts to confront crimes “so heinous or outside the bounds of what society can expect.”
He said the Colorado public defender system’s aggressive defense of death-penalty cases has kept an appropriate check on abuse of the death penalty.
“The fact that Colorado has such a strong, ideologically-driven public defender system has served as a very effective check on death-penalty cases in this jurisdiction,” Hautzinger said. “No one can say the death penalty has been abused over last 30 years.”
Mike Saccone can be reached via e-mail at msaccone@gjds.com.
When is the system going to work for everyone
We have seen five years of lost liberties all in the name of keeping America safe. You and I know that we can keep America safe and free at the same time. We can uphold the liberties outlined in the Constitution, while at the same time ensuring our government is diligent in keeping us secure.Today, you can begin restoring the Constitution and American values. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and several other senators are getting ready to introduce a bill to fix the Military Commissions Act, a law that stains our nation's legacy as the standard-bearer for the protection of human rights, undermines American values of due process and removes important checks on the president's power.
Help restore lost liberties -- tell your senators to co-sponsor Senator Dodd's bill today.
We are asking you to continue to stand with us right now and over the coming months as we campaign to rebuild our fundamental freedoms and ensure that Congress and the courts restore our Constitution and the rule of law.You will hear more from us during the coming months on all the ways that your efforts can support this campaign.
Take the first step now by supporting Senator Dodd's bill.
In their last hours before adjourning last year, Congress passed and the president signed the Military Commissions Act. In doing so, they cast aside the Constitution and the centuries-old principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. Congress also gave the president the power to decide by himself who is and who is not an enemy, and to strip individuals of their right to due process under the law.
Join us in keeping America Safe and Free -- tell your senators to restore due process.
Senator Dodd's bill restores due process and the Constitution’s habeas corpus rights for detainees being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. It enforces the Geneva Conventions as the law on how we treat people. And it holds government officials accountable so that due process violations and torture stop, and never happen again.when nearly 400 men are held indefinitely and without charge at Guantanamo, that’s un-American. But when our own government admits that more than 100 of them shouldn’t even be there, and that no more than a few dozen will ever be charged, that is an affront to our Constitution and is a stain on our nation. Adding insult to injury, just yesterday the U.S. refused to sign onto a U.N. treaty that would prohibit governments from holding people in secret detention.
Ask your senators to end indefinite detention without due process.Senator Dodd's bill is only the beginning of our efforts to restore habeas corpus and due process. We've got a long battle ahead of us to restore the Constitution and reverse the damage done by the Military Commissions Act. You'll be hearing more about this campaign in the coming weeks, but you can take a first step today by contacting your senators and asking them to co-sponsor Senator Dodd's bill.hank you for getting involved.Sincerely,
Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director
ACLU
Since the last edition eight executions in three states were stayed or permitted a brief reprieve. As succinctly noted by the Death Penalty Information Center, "[t]he governor of Ohio granted 3 stays to further study the possibility of clemency. One Texas execution was stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court for review in relation to a pending decision in a similar Texas case. Another Texas execution was stayed for a state court to examine new evidence. And in North Carolina, a state judge stayed three executions because of lethal injection challenges."
In a major noncapital sentencing case, the Supreme Court in Cunningham v. California struck down the California noncapital scheme. In the latest line of Apprendi cases the Court reaffirms, 6-3, that jurors and not judges must determine facts. California's sentencing scheme, no matter how the state courts dress it up, requires judicial fact finding under its determinative sentencing law.
As noted in greater detail below, the Indiana Supreme Court has issued an order staying the execution of Norman Timberlake, who was scheduled to be executed on January 19th. The Indiana Supreme Court last month had denied a petition that claimed "he is severely mentally ill, insane and incompetent to be executed. Holding that the grant of certiorari in Panetti v. Dretke, indicates the Supreme Court “may soon revisit and address the application of the Eighth Amendment to claims that mental illness bars execution.
"On January 19, 2007," the Habeas Assistant & Training Project notes, "Justice Kennedy issued an order staying the evidentiary hearing scheduled for January 23, 2007 in the Central District of California in California death row inmate John Visciotti´s pending habeas case. Ayers v. Visciotti, 06A711. The evidentiary hearing is stayed pending the Court´s receipt of supplemental briefs which are to address two questions: (1) Did Visciotti raise before the state court the claim to be addressed by the scheduled evidentiary hearing?: and (2) Did Visciotti raise before the district court prior to the Supreme Court´s decision in Woodford v. Visciotti, 537 U.S. 19 (2002) (per curiam), the claim to be addressed by the evidentiary hearing?" HAT's Week at a Glance, from which the above is taken, has been doing exceptionally fine work of late and well worth a visit.
In Maryland this week a bill to repeal its death penalty and replace it with life without parole was introduced and has been co-sponsored by about 1/4 of the state’s delegates and senators. A similar bill has been introduced in South Dakota. The North Carolina Medical Board, which licenses and disciplines doctors in the state, has unanimously voted to make it unethical for a physician to participate in executions. Paris will be hosting the 3rd World Congress against the death penalty from February 1-3, 2007. LDF & Columbia Law School will be hosting a symposium entitled "Pursuing Racial Fairness in Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After McCleskey v. Kemp" March 2 & 3 at Columbia Law School. Lastly in the news this past week, Neal Walker has passed from natural causes with services scheduled for next Saturday in New Orleans.