Senate rejects death penalty repeal

DENVER - A bill to repeal the death penalty in Colorado landed on death row Monday after the State Senate voted to gut the measure.

The Senate's action set up a possible confrontation with the House, which had approved the repeal. But any long-shot negotiations to bridge the chasm between the two houses face a deadline of midnight Wednesday, when the Legislature must adjourn.

The bill, HB1274, would have taken at least $1 million that the state would save by ending capital prosecutions and transferred the money to the state's cold-case homicide unit.

Family members of murder victims whose cases were unsolved advocated for the bill, and Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, the prime Senate sponsor of repeal, cast it as a law-and-order measure to get killers off the streets. "Public safety is best addressed by looking for those 1,400 murderers who have so far gotten away with murder," she said.

Carroll also argued that capital punishment was irreversible and pointed to the 130 people released from death rows across the country after being cleared. "We do occasionally make mistakes," she said.

Opponents noted that no such exonerations had taken place in Colorado. They also argued that it was a "blatant gimmick," in the words of Sen. Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, to link death penalty repeal to cold-case funding.

The debate became moot when Sens. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, and Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, offered an amendment that let the death penalty stand while funding cold-case investigations through a $2.50 surcharge on booking fees paid by felony suspects and distributed to the cold-case units of local law enforcement agencies.

Morse spoke of murder cases from his days as a Fountain police chief and Colorado Springs police officer.

"I really have trouble saying that this one is more heinous than this one," he said. "They were all lives lost, and there is definitely a part of me that's like we ought to either execute all the murderers or we ought to execute none of the murderers."

Morse said he had misgivings about either course, and he was one of a handful of Democratic senators whose votes on the death penalty were in the balance before the the discussion became moot.

"Both sides were probably one vote short of knowing that they had it killed or passed," Penry said after the vote.

Voting to strip the death penalty repeal from the bill were five Democrats - Morse and Sens. Dan Gibbs, Mary Hodge, Jim Isgar and Lois Tochtrop. If the death penalty repeal had come up for a vote and all five had voted against it, the measure would have failed.

By shelving the death penalty issue, Senate Democrats set aside a hot potato that might have burned them politically. Mitchell, perhaps the Senate's most skillful debater, previewed a likely 2010 campaign theme when he attacked Gov. Bill Ritter on Monday for declining to take a stand on the death penalty, declaring that the governor "is not a profile in courage or in leadership."

Ritter, a former Denver district attorney who asked for the death penalty several times, fired back. "For three legislative sessions, Sen. Mitchell has been on the outside as a critic," Ritter said. "He has not added much of substance to any sort of debate that we've had."

Contact the writer at 476-1654. Gazette writer John Schroyer contributed to this report.