The Politics of Killing

That's the title of a must-read article in Denver's 5280 magazine.  It's written by Patrick Doyle and Natasha Gardner.  5280 also has "Lethal Divide," a resource page for more information on death penalty issues in Colorado.

Thirty-two years have passed since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States, and the debates surrounding it—deterrence, cost, retribution, and more—continue. Proponents call the death penalty an "absolute justice," while detractors decry it as a "human rights violation." Today, support for the "ultimate punishment" has plummeted—only 45 percent support it nationwide—and the number of death-row executions is at an all-time low.

The article is here.  A brief excerpt:

Compared to states like Texas and Florida, it's incredibly difficult to secure a death sentence in Colorado. Until recently, juries in Texas and Florida were given an unbalanced choice: Sentence a heinous murderer for an execution, or he'd be up for parole eventually. They often chose death. Texas legislators refused to pass life-without-parole laws for years because capital punishment was an easy and popular way to prove they were tough on crime. In the 1990s, Texas, under the leadership of then-Governor George W. Bush, executed more than 150 people; during the past 30 years, the state has been responsible for more than a third of the executions in the United States.

Colorado has been far more judicious in its application of capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that the death penalty was constitutional in 1976, after a brief nationwide ban. While legislators have tinkered with the law in an attempt to increase executions, Colorado juries have been given the option to sentence a murderer to life in prison without parole since 1979. Juries like this option: They don't have to choose between life and death. With a criminal forever locked behind bars, jurors can be secure knowing that society is safe from harm, and that they did justice.

Currently, there are only two men on Colorado's death row: Nathan Dunlap and Sir Mario Owens, both sentenced in Arapahoe County. Owens got a death sentence in May for murdering a witness scheduled to testify against a friend of Owens' in his drug trial. (He also killed the witness's fiancée.) Owens has been on death row for months; Dunlap has been there for 12 years, watching only one inmate, Gary Lee Davis, be executed, while all of the other death-marked inmates have been spilled back into life terms.

The reasons why one heinous murderer is sentenced to death while another heinous murderer is sentenced to life has less to do with the facts of the cases and more to do with happenstance and the prevailing political winds. Consider the death sentences prosecuted in Denver by DA Bill Ritter, who reserved capital-punishment trials for cases where he "reasonably believed we could get it." Out of more than 600 murders in Denver between 1993 and 2004, Ritter prosecuted only seven death-penalty cases for multiple homicides or a rape/murder combination. All of the defendants faced overwhelming evidence that they had committed horrible murders. Still, none of those men will be executed.