Colorado lawmakers considering bill to ban the death penalty
Three Colorado inmates are currently sitting on death row. The state brought the death penalty back in the 1970s but hasn’t executed anyone in more than 20 years.
Now the state legislature, bringing forward a bill to repeal the death penalty in Colorado.
Denise Maes , the Public Policy Director for the ACLU of Colorado, supports the bill.
” We feel it’s a particularly flawed and broken system, we feel it’s given out arbitrarily and has a lot of racial disproportionally, ” Maes said.
Maes said it’s expensive to try a death penalty case and says studies show it doesn’t serve as a deterrent to crime.
” There are some states that have rid the death penalty that have high crimes of violence and the same is true of states that have repealed it – they can also have high crimes or not, ” Maes said.
But Republican State Senator Paul Lundeen disagrees, citing other studies show capital punishment does serve as a deterrent to crime.
” They even put a ratio on it, for every 1 execution there are 5 lives saved. So from that perspective, from the moral perspective, from the deterrent value of the death penalty, I oppose the bill, ” Lundeen said.
Lundeen adds it’s still a complicated issue because a death penalty case is rather a long process nowadays.
” The connection in the eye and the mind of society between conviction, execution and deterrent effect has become a little bit fuzzy, ” Lundeen said.
Should it make it through the legislature, Governor Jared Polis has said he’d sign the bill.
The bill is set to be heard for the second reading Monday in the Colorado State Senate. However, it’s been laid over multiple times as it seems to not have the votes to clear the Senate, so it’s possible it could be laid over once again Monday morning.
