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April 29, 2009 11:17 PM UTC
37 Comments
The fact that it’s the #1 e-mail/voicemail issue aside, Bill Ritter promised to sign legislation that put a moratorium on the death penalty if it ever reached his desk.
He can veto it, but after a while all these broken campaign promises are going to catch up with him.
for reminding all of that promise.
It would not surprise me in the least to see him break that promise. Hopefully that is just because I am completely jaded by Ritter at this point.
I feel the same way, but it’s saddening because I do want the Governor to succeed.
I voted for him, and if he’s the candidate in 2010 I will most likely vote for him again. Most voters aren’t as forgiving as I am though.
I had forgotten that he did promise to sign it. And Richardson did in New Mexico, which puts a bit more pressure on Ritter, I would think.
I truly hope he signs this. The money, time and legal effort currently being spent on death penalty cases could be put to much better use.
And I must admit, I’ve never been a big fan of capital punishment for two reasons:
A. It’s been proven that it is not a detriment to crime.
B. I’m not a big fan of sanctioning the State to kill its civilians.
….when did Ritter promise this? During the 2006 campaign? Did he draw a distinction between a moratorium and an outright abolition? If so, does that matter here?
I will take notes this time, prof!
I am not certain about whether he publicly promised this; but, I know for a fact that he promised this to a supporter at a campaign event in LoDo.
If a bill abolishing the death penalty passed in the Colorado Legislature, he would sign the bill into law.
A promise to a supporter at a campaign event is not the same as an official position on a website, with a press release, etc. I can see him go back on his “promise” especially after having been over 2 years in office now. Clearly the base is angry with him over Bennet–that’s a much bigger factor in his decision. That, and how the Catholic Church weighs in, since Ritter is a Catholic. Conversely, the DA’s are very angry over this and some could make this “soft on crime a big campaign issue. He probably hopes this will die in the Senate.
I’m not some fancy big city lawyer, so I thought they were interchangeable terms.
but the difference is, a moratorium would be a temporary stop on the death penalty; legislation abolishing it would remove that law from the Colorado Revised Statutes.
…and almost meaningless given that no person is in danger of being executed any time soon.
Pueblo’s Bill Thiebaut supports 1274:
http://www.denverpost.com/sear…
and the hearing hasn’t actually started yet…
more of the DAs who oppose the death penalty, aren’t willing to show a little more political courage by making their views expressly known.
Good for Thiebault.
Also testifying in opposition to the death penalty today: the father of one of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing case, and a death row warden from Florida.
…for a defendant in one pending case?
says Thiebault supported a BILL that would eliminate the death penalty.
DA’s have to seek the death penalty where appropriate – they don’t get to decide which laws they like and don’t like.
This bill should be in Judiciary given its subject matter. State Affairs has been used at times as a miscellaneous bill kill committee. This may be a case of Senate leadership wanting to avoid placing Ritter in the position of having to veto or sign the bill going into the 2010 election.
I had heard that Ritter was going to kill it in Appropriations if he didn’t succeed in killing it in State Affairs.
Rollie Heath, of Boulder, refuses to answer calls and e-mails asking what his position is. Not promising at all.
Does he have any weight with the legislature nowadays?
If you think the Gov can kill or pass a bill just because he is the Gov. think again.
On to Appropriations.
Was sent to State Affairs because the votes were much more certain to get it out than in Judiciary. Additionally, Ritter is telling a variety of folks that it is DOA. The argument he is using is that this is not a straight up or down death penalty bill. The linking of the death penalty and cold case support from CBI will not really help victims and is intellectually dishonest, says the administration.
the DAs are all for victims’ rights, until those conflict with the DAs own agenda–and then the victims are just plain wrong!
And talk about intellectual dishonesty: How does Ritter square his campaign promise with his decision to sneakily make sure the bill never gets to him in the first place?
The truth is 1274 is intellectually dishonest. Trotting out vulnerable families who have lost loved ones in order to push a completely different agenda is shameful. If cold cases were that important, I’m sure the legislature could’ve found the $1m some other way.
Let’s flip this around. Would Weissmann and other supporters be pushing hard to add $1m to cold cases if it weren’t attached to abolishing the dealth penalty? I don’t think so. They don’t really care about cold cases, they just care about getting rid of the death penalty.
If there are so many people against the death penalty, and the arguments are so strong against it, why not put it state wide and let the people decide.
Not a direct democracy. What do we even have legislators for if we need to send everything to the ballot?
The Guv’s office, AG’s office, and you, are just wrong with your reasoning.
The legislature can ban it, and Ritter promised to sign it if they did. It’s that simple.
The Governer and AG have decades of experience seeing the worst of the worst our society has to offer. I would give their opinion a little more weight than that.
If we are only a representative democracy, why do we have to wade through issues from school spending to gay marriage on the ballot every year?
If you oppose the death penalty, that’s fine. I happen to support it because I think we should be able to use it for the most heinous acts. If it lost after an honest debate, so be it. But we shouldn’t backdoor it by claiming a “savings” – that is exactly what criminal defense attorneys and others with an agenda have been trying to set up for years. If the legislature falls for it, shame on them.
aren’t voting for it because of the cold case money. That’s just a smart use of the funds that won’t be used to kill people anymore. The money has to go somewhere.
criminal defense attorneys stand to PROFIT from repeal of the death penalty because…because…how’s that, again? What, exactly, is their hidden and nefarious agenda?
Perhaps criminal defense attorneys oppose the death penalty because many of them have gotten to know the families and loved ones of the “worst of the worst;” and perhaps they have become familiar with the backgrounds of these “worst of the worst,” and know that these families will also suffer from the ultimate form of premeditated murder; and perhaps because they are familiar with the statistical studies that show the gross racial disparity involved in death penalty prosecutions; and perhaps because they have familiarized themselves with the facts showing that innocent people have been wrongly sentenced to death and, yes, even executed in this country. Maybe, perhaps, that is why many criminal defense attorneys oppose the death penalty. I defy you to demonstrate how criminal defense attorneys would personally benefit from the repeal of the death penalty.
Also, perhaps we should stop pretending that all families of victims of homicides support the death penalty; many don’t–and DAs often do not listen to these death penalty opponents in making the decision about whether to seek it.
If anything, they stand to lose money because if the death penalty is gone then there won’t be a death penalty appeals process to go through anymore.
As far as the sway that victims’ families should have on the sentencing, they deserve to be heard, but I don’t think they should get the final say on the punishment. That’s just not the way our justice system works.
My point, in case you missed it several times above, is the misleading nature of the current bill.
You say people aren’t voting for this because of the cold case money. Then why go through the dog and pony show of putting cold case victim families up there to say how much they support the bill? Saying this will help get justice for their loved ones is probably the saddest thing of all – because chances are it won’t. Putting an extra investigator or two on a 40 year old cold case just means more people are shuffling papers.
But since you have gone there, I will say this. First, I never indicated criminal defense attorneys would profit from a repeal of the death penalty. Read my posts again. Many are ideologically opposed to the death penalty and have been pushing this bill since the beginning. Many themselves embrace the strategy of pushing up costs in order to say it should be repealed because it costs too much.
How could Colorado defense attorneys get to know the families of the worst of the worst, as you say, when there’s only two criminals on death row in Colorado? Unless the defense team for each defendant consists of 100 attorneys, you’ve made a blatant overstatement.
Other than that your arguments are the kind I wish we were having rather than this cold case nonsense.
I’m for the death penalty for people like Timothy McVeigh, Sir Mario Owens, cop killers, and others who deserve the ultimate punishment, even if they have families that love them. You believe it has been unfairly applied and is morally wrong. Let’s put all those arguments out there and let the people decide straight up. None of this smoke and mirrors about cold cases.
went into this with open eyes. Nobody forced any of the FOHVAMP folks to testify in favor of this bill; nobody forced the father of one of Timothy McVeigh’s victims to testify. The “dog and pony show,” as you call it, was a voluntary effort by these folks to support legislation which serves a dual purpose.
As for your contention that I made a “blatant overstatement,” while there are only two people on death row in Colorado, there are many, many more death penalty prosecutions in Colorado each year. The mitigation information discovered in the backgrounds of the individuals subject to capital case prosecutions often ends up being part of the public court record, and some of that information may sometimes be shared during defense lectures and conferences–much as the DAs share information about capital crime cases at their conferences in an effort to strategize ways to maximize the chance of obtaining death verdicts.
It is about money, and the proposal for this bill applies the saved money to possibly resolving a cold case or two.
The death penalty does nothing more than provide an extra sense of vengeance. It’s not a deterrent, and because of its finality, it’s expensive to litigate through to conclusion. It has been abused in too many states, and never used here since its re-enactment.
To me, this bill should be a no-brainer.
one interesting thing about the cold case piece of this puzzle is that the DAs previously supported a bill that put more resources into cold cases.