There are editorials today from Colorado and Kansas. Let's start with, "Eliminating death penalty in Colorado the right move," from the Boulder Daily Camera. It's signed by Erika Stutzman for the editorial board.
There are more than 1,400 unsolved homicides since 1970 in Colorado. House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, pointed out that the last death-penalty case tried in Colorado cost $1.4 million to prosecute.
Here's what happened: Jose Luis Rubi-Nava, charged with the brutal killing of his girlfriend, pleaded guilty instead. That grand price tag didn't result in his death -- something that a whole lot of people still clamor for -- but instead with a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Non-capital cases cost about $70,000, Weissmann said. There are two men on Colorado's death row now. Imagine if the state were to spend $140,000 prosecuting those cases, rather than an estimated $2.8 million. Imagine if those millions, instead, were able to solve the murder of Boulder's Sid Wells, who at 22 was found killed execution-style on Aug. 1, 1983.
A Gallup poll in the fall showed that 64 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, while just 30 percent oppose it. But death as a deterrent to hideous, heinous crimes doesn't seem to hold water in the United States, despite that widespread support of it.
Texas has 373 people on death row. It has put 423 convicts to death since 1974, when the death penalty was reinstated. The murder rate there is 5.9 per 100,000.
Colorado, which has executed just one person since 1975 when the death penalty was reinstated, has a murder rate of 3.3 per 100,000. So the "don't mess with Texas" adage as a deterrent isn't working as planned. North Dakota, with no death penalty, has a murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000. Iowa doesn't have the death penalty; the rate there is 1.8 per 100,000.
To be fair, New Hampshire does have the death penalty and its murder rate is about as low as it can go: 1 per 100,000. New Hampshire also hasn't put anyone to death since the death penalty was reinstated there.
One correction. To date, Texas has actually executed 435.
In Kansas, today's Wichita Eagle has the editorial, "State's death penalty has yet to work."
The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment outweighs the risk of error," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in 2006 in support of the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Kansas' death penalty.
Three years later, that good remains elusive in Kansas.
None of the 12 men sentenced to die under the 15-year-old law is near execution; two have been resentenced to life in prison, and another is awaiting resentencing.
Each step of each murderer's appeal -- a process that, to avert error, is highly complex by necessity -- seems to reveal another problem with the law.
The latest snag affected the murderer whose case the high court addressed: that of Michael Marsh, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 murders of a Wichita woman and her 19-month-old daughter. A 2008 state court ruling in another case effectively meant Sedgwick County prosecutors couldn't retry Marsh; under a plea bargain, he was resentenced this month to life in prison.
Lawyers predict more cases will be affected by the court's ruling, which said that prosecutors can file only a single capital murder charge in cases involving multiple murder victims. That will mean more delays, costs and uncertainty.
Meanwhile, a legislative effort led by state Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, to repeal the death penalty primarily to save money stopped short of a vote in the Kansas Senate this session and is slated for more study. Maybe next year the issue will get the full legislative re-examination it deserves -- not just because each death penalty case costs an average 70 percent more than each noncapital case, but because of the punishment's uneven application around the state and questionable value as a deterrent.
And:
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