NOREEN: Killer gets an early Christmas present

Christmas came early for Marco Lee, and Ken Jordan will never see another one.

The result of Friday's plea bargain for cop killer Marco Lee left a bad taste for the entire Colorado Springs Police Department, whose members wanted to see Lee on the business end of a lethal injection some day.

Jordan, the Colorado Springs police officer who died heroically in the line of duty in December 2006, died after Lee shot him six times. Lee, now 27, was extremely drunk when he was pulled over­ - so drunk that defense attorneys planned to argue Lee was too drunk to form the intent that's a necessary element of first-degree murder.

If he had been convicted of second-degree murder instead, the maximum sentence Lee would have faced would have been 48 years.

Prosecutors didn't want to take a chance on that. Lee didn't want to take a chance that he would face the death penalty.

A sentence of life without parole plus 167 years doesn't seem like much of a gift, but these things are relative.

Addressing a packed courtroom, Police Chief Richard Myers said Lee "ceases to exist today as a person. He's going to have to sit and think every single day of his miserable existence."

In court, the many police officers who would like to see Lee dead held up pretty well until Lee admitted to District Judge David Miller, "Basically I shot and killed Officer Jordan."

Minutes later, Myers' voice began to crack as he described the department's collective feeling. In that moment, sorrow overcame the anger.

Around the courtroom, shoulders slumped, officers looked down into their own folded hands, and the tears began to flow.

As Jordan's family members unleashed their anger at Lee, many in the room quietly wept.

Prosecutor Diana May made the case for the plea bargain but said "we still feel an appropriate sentence for Mr. Lee would be execution."

May blamed Colorado's death penalty statute for the fact that few killers are executed in the state. The last person executed here was Gary Davis, in 1997; there are only two men on death row now, including a Denver man who was convicted this month.

But the U.S. Supreme Court mandated long ago that any state's death penalty law must include a weighing process involving aggravating and mitigating factors of each case.

Only a handful of states conduct regular executions.

Because the death penalty is used so rarely and these cases cost taxpayers so much money, the argument could be made that we'd be better off without a death penalty.

It's also true, though, that the threat of a death sentence was Lee's incentive to plead guilty, and without that threat, he would have had nothing to lose by going to trial.

District Attorney John Newsome said making the decision not to pursue the death penalty "was hell."

Newsome could have left the untidy case and the difficult decision to his successor, Dan May, who takes office in January, but he didn't.

"It's my job," Newsome said. "It was my case, it was my job and I had to do it."

It won't be any fun, but Marco Lee gets to live.

The rest of us have to find comfort in the fact that Lee has little to look forward to, and that he won't pose a danger to us. Almost certainly he will die alone in prison, having wasted his life, and no one will care.

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Contact Noreen at 636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com. He appears Fridays at noon on KOAA TV channels 5/30 and on KRDO radio 105.5 FM and 1240 AM at 6:40 a.m.