Is There Breathing Room in Colorado?

The final hours of a legislative session is a frenetic time.  Colorado legislators will adjourn tomorrow, but supporters of HB 1274 believe there is a small chance that death penalty repeal can be returned to the bill.  Yesterday, senators stripped the repeal portion of the bill ou,t requiring a return to the House chamber.  Odds are against a sufficient number of senators changing their vote, but...

"Death penalty repeal gets 11th hour reprieve," is the report by John Schroyer for the Colorado Springs Gazette.

A proposal to repeal Colorado's death penalty and divert the savings toward investigating unsolved murders has gotten a reprieve, despite having been rejected Monday by the state Senate.

The measure, which had been approved by the Colorado House, ran into opposition in the Senate, where lawmakers eliminated the repeal of the death penalty. That left only additional funding for the state's cold case unit, which would be raised by charging convicted felons an additional fee.

Instead of bowing to the Senate's changes, House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, sent it to a conference committee Tuesday.

The six-member committee has the power to alter the bill and then send it to both the House and Senate for a final vote. Depending on how the political wrangling goes, there's still a chance that a repeal of the death penalty might pass.

As the prime sponsor of the bill, Weissmann said he's committed to passing the bill with or without the death penalty provision. He said there are a number of problems with the new funding mechanism that he would like to see cleaned up.

Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, though, said she's committed to restoring the bill to its original version. She said she's confident that the change will be made by the committee, but balked at predicting which version will be approved by the Legislature.

The controversial bill has split the Democratic party in two, with centrist members in both houses voting to kill it. In the House, it passed by a single vote. In the Senate, five of the 21 Democrats voted no, with several saying they'd like to repeal the death penalty but didn't think it was right to couple the issue with cold case funding.

Carroll would need two of the five Senate Democrats who opposed it to change their vote to get it passed.

We'll have an answer in a matter of hours.  Earlier coverage of the Colorado legislation begins here.