Tuesday, March 5, 2019

COLORADO DEATH PENALTY MUST STAY!



“Countries that give up the death penalty award an unimaginable advantage to the criminal over his victim, the advantage of life over death.”

 
Surrounded by family and friends, Rhonda Fields, center left, and Christine Wolfe, center right, the mothers of Javad Marshall-Fields and Vivian Wolfe, approach the site where the couple was gunned down June 20, 2005, at the corner of East Idaho Place and Dayton Street, during a candlelight vigil Thursday, July 21, 2005. The shooting led to the death penalty conviction of Robert Ray and Sir Mario Owens. Rhonda Fields is now a state senator. (AP Photo/Aurora Sentinel and Daily Sun, Patrick Kelley)

            The State of Colorado plans to abolish the death penalty. We the comrades of Unit 1012: The VFFDP, want you to remember the murder victims and hear from their families and officials, who are against abolition of the death penalty.

            Unit 1012: The VFFDP, wants the people to vote and not the senators.

Colorado lawmakers will consider whether to repeal the death penalty again, as factors align for passage
The Colorado legislature has debated getting rid of capital punishment four times since 2000. The bill being brought this year wouldn’t send the question to voters, as proponents of lethal injection want.
Published on Mar 3, 2019 5:00AM MST Politics and Government 

From left: State Rep. Tom Sullivan, a Centennial Democrat, and state Sen. Rhonda Fields, an Aurora Democrat. Sullivan’s son, Alex, was murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting and Fields’ son, Javad, and his fiancee, Vivian Wolfe, were killed in a 2005 shooting. Both Sullivan and Fields are against repealing the death penalty. (Photos by Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)


“It is truly saved for the worst of the worst kind of cases”

The 18th Judicial District is where all three men on Colorado’s death row were sentenced to die by lethal injection. It’s also where Holmes was prosecuted and a handful of other potential death penalty cases were heard in recent years.

Ask District Attorney George Brauchler, a Republican whose term has been dominated by his support for capital punishment, why he supports its use and he produces a list of reasons. Among them: It saves taxpayers money because it drives plea agreements in first-degree murder cases, helping victims avoid reliving their experiences during grueling trials.

“That’s real cost savings,” he said. “That’s real savings to victims.”

Brauchler is also chief among those who think the issue should be sent to the ballot for voters to decide. Anything less, he says, sends a message that Colorado lawmakers don’t trust the people to decide. After all, they’ve been given tough decisions before: marijuana, taxes, and oil and gas regulation

“Why can they be trusted with all of these issues, none of which are more complicated or more serious?” he said.

Brauchler predicted if the repeal passes in the legislature, a ballot initiative will be brought to reinstate it. That’s what happened in Nebraska, where the state legislature abolished capital punishment in 2015 but voters brought it back in a statewide vote the next year.

Recent polling on capital punishment in Colorado is sparse. But in 2015, a Quinnipiac University poll showed that 67 percent of the state’s voters thought the death penalty should continue to be law, while 26 percent said it should be abolished.

Colorado voters rejected a ballot measure to repeal the death penalty in 1966.

Jim Bullock, the district attorney for several counties in southeast Colorado, agrees that the people should make the determination. The Republican points out that capital punishment is used sparingly in the state because of the strict rules governing when it’s allowed.

In Colorado, the death penalty can only be sought in a first-degree murder case against someone who has killed in an “especially heinous, cruel, or depraved manner.” The penalty also is available in cases where the victim is a police officer or other first responder, a judge, an elected official or a witness to a crime. If a defendant kills a pregnant woman, multiple people at once, or more than one person in multiple criminal episodes they are also eligible for capital punishment.

“It is truly saved for the worst of the worst kind of cases,” Bullock said. “The morality issue — that’s for each and every individual to determine. You cannot legislate morality, it’s what the overall sense of justice is for all of the community and all of the citizens.”

Bullock’s office is pursuing a death penalty case against Miguel Contreras-Perez, who is accused of killing Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility corrections officer Mary Ricard in 2012. At the time of the attack, Contreras-Perez was serving 35 years to life in prison for the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl.

Cases like that one are why Sen. Bob Gardner, a Colorado Springs Republican, has voted again and again to keep the death penalty.

“I believe that the death penalty is appropriate for the most heinous sorts of crimes, and I believe it is a deterrent for certain types of crime when there is no other deterrent, in particular those who are already incarcerated for lengthy sentences really have no deterrent for committing a murder of a corrections officer,” he said.

Gardner says he has asked himself if a Colorado jury would ever sentence a defendant to death given the number of recent cases where they’ve refused to do so. But that’s not the point, he said, “the possibility of the death penalty is as important as the imposition of the death penalty.”

“It was within the first month that I was in the General Assembly that I debated this issue,” said Gardner, who first became a state lawmaker in 2007 and is the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary committee. “It’s 2019 and this issue is still being debated. I think the debate is fair enough. We should always ask ourselves as a society: Does it continue to be right? Does it continue to be appropriate? For me, that answer will always be ‘yes.’”

From left: Vivian Wolfe and Javad Marshall Fields. (Provided by Sen. Rhonda Fields)


The parents at the legislature

In January, Sen. Fields took to the podium on the Senate floor and began a speech that immediately captured the attention of everyone in the room.

“Today my heart is heavy,” she began. “On this day, Jan. 29, 1983, I gave birth to my only son. He turns 36 years old in heaven. I can tell you that living without him has been a very lonely journey. I can still remember what it was like to carry him for nine months. I can remember what it was like when I saw him and met him for the first time.”

Fields’ son, Javad, was 22 when he and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe, were gunned down on June 20, 2005, in Aurora. Javad was assisting police as a witness in the murder of his best friend, who had been killed by Sir Mario Owens.

Owens later opened fire on the couple, targeting Javad for his cooperation.

Since then, Fields has entered politics and risen to a top position in the Colorado Senate as Democrats’ assistant majority leader. She is against repealing the death penalty and said she plans to be vocal about her opposition.

“It’s going to be a difficult conversation, but it’s one that we have to have,” she said. “I think that’s how we get at good public policy, when we talk through it and we don’t push through it without having a full debate. I’m looking forward to having that debate and that discussion on the floor if it makes it that far. I’m not afraid of it. It’s not hurtful for me because it’s something that we have to talk about. For me to shy away from it or to shrink from it is just not something that I can do. I’m going to speaking out and address the issue as it’s confronted to me with.”

Fields, who is black, rejects arguments made against the death penalty on the basis of race and cost.

“What price do you put on justice?” she said. “What value do you want to put on my son’s life and his fiancée life? I don’t know if there is a price tag that you can put on justice. Justice is very expensive. I know how much we spend down here on the Department of Corrections and our judicial branch.”

Rep. Tom Sullivan, D-Centennial, speaks at a press conference announcing a “red flag” bill on Feb. 14, 2019 inside the state Capitol in Denver. (Eric Lubbers, The Colorado Sun)

She is joined in her opposition by Sullivan, a fellow Democrat who is in the House. His son, Alex, was murdered in the Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan spent roughly three months watching the death penalty prosecution of his son’s killer unfold in an Arapahoe County courtroom.

Sullivan says he understands the problem with the death penalty, but still feels that “as a society, we should be able to do that.” He says he would rather fix capital punishment in Colorado this year rather than do away with it.

“I’m not going to be counting votes against it. I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I will tell my story and leave it at that. But I have some very poignant stories to tell. I mean, it is very vivid in my memory — several instances during that trial that I will relay to the people that are sitting here that they have not heard from anyone else. And that they wouldn’t hear from anybody else.”

One conversation with prosecutors in particular stands out for Sullivan, the one when he had to say aloud that he wanted them to seek the death penalty for the gunman. He compared it to the questions flight attendants ask those who sit in an exit row on an airplane about being willing to assist in an emergency. Federal rules mandate that passengers have to verbally respond.

“The only thing even comparable, that maybe you can understand, is if you get in those three (exit) rows of seats in the middle of the airplane where you get the extra legroom and they come and ask you those questions,” Sullivan said. “When they look at you, you actually have to say to them that you understand the questions that they asked. This was exactly the same type of thing. You couldn’t nod your head, you couldn’t, you know, mumble or just give them a head shake. No, you actually had to say the words across from them. ‘Yes, I want that person put to death.’ ”

Staff writer John Ingold contributed to this report.


Brauchler: Coloradans should have the final say on the death penalty (and I’d hope they keep it)
By GEORGE BRAUCHLER |
March 1, 2019 at 12:04 pm

Our General Assembly is poised to take away from Coloradans the decision about whether to have a death penalty, citing lack of popular support, lack of deterrence, excessive costs and even racism in its application. Each of these points is easily refuted. There are good reasons to maintain capital punishment in our state and even better reasons for Coloradans themselves to decide whether to repeal it.

Anti-death penalty activists regularly claim as justification for repeal that public sentiment for capital punishment is waning. Colorado doesn’t need to rely on outcome-driven polling or speculation to answer this question. We can rely on the only poll that matters: the ballot.

In the many decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty constitutional, no state’s voters have repealed it. None. While several state courts and legislatures have ended capital punishment, whenever and wherever voters are permitted to vote on the death penalty, they vote to keep it. In some cases, they vote to put it back into law after a legislature imposes its will over the voters’.

In 2016, the Nebraska legislature repealed the death penalty and then overrode the governor’s veto of that repeal. Nebraskans overwhelmingly voted it back in the next general election. That same year, there were two ballot measures in California to repeal the death penalty and to speed up the appellate process for death sentences. Californians — yes, Californians — voted to keep the death penalty and to speed up the appellate process.

The stubborn reality that the public still supports a death penalty is precisely why anti-death penalty legislators and the governor will deny us the right to vote on it. Even former Gov. John Hickenlooper, after suspending the death sentence of mass murderer Nathan Dunlap, said that the repeal of the death penalty was not a matter for the legislature, but for the people of Colorado.

Good idea. Coloradans can be trusted to vote on important matters like taxes, term limits, school funding, marijuana and the death penalty.

If the legislature permits us to vote on the abolition of the death penalty, we can have an honest debate about the facts and reasons for and against capital punishment.

There have been numerous studies with widely divergent and sometimes inconsistent findings on the issue of deterrence. Recently, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences engaged in a comprehensive analysis of those many studies and concluded: “claims that research demonstrates that capital punishment decreases or increases the homicide rate by a specified amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.”

And yet, deterrence is only one of many purposes of sentencing. The paramount goal of sentencing is the imposition of justice. Sometimes, justice is dismissing a charge, granting a plea bargain, expunging a past conviction, seeking a prison sentence, or — in a very few cases, for the worst of the worst murderers — sometimes, justice is death.

A drug cartel member who murders a rival cartel member faces life in prison without parole.

What if he murders two, three, or 12 people? Or the victim is a child or multiple children?

What if the murder was preceded by torture or rape? How about a serial killer? Or a terrorist who kills dozens, hundreds or thousands?

The repeal of the death penalty treats all murders as the same. Once a person commits a single act of murder, each additional murder is a freebie.

That is not justice.

President Barack Obama agrees. Although he has called the death penalty troubling, his justice department sought capital punishment numerous times, including in the cases of the Boston Marathon bomber and the murderer of nine in a Charleston church.

A state without a death penalty promises the evilest among us that “no matter what you do to us, and no matter how many times you do it and to whom you do it, you never have to worry about forfeiting your life.”

Anti-death penalty activists also claim without reliable or logical support that capital punishment costs too much. They object to my refusal to give the Aurora theater mass murderer the sentence he found acceptable and they repeat the unproven claim (the office of the public defender has never disclosed what it spent) that the trial “cost $5 million.” They skip the fact that most of the money spent by my office was to uphold the rights of the 1,158 victims.

Those who suggest that the repeal of the death penalty would lead to significant savings ignore common sense. If Colorado had no death penalty on July 20, 2012, does anybody honestly believe that the mass murderer would have shown up in court to plead guilty and go to prison for eternity? No. The same lengthy trial would have occurred with all the same victims, witnesses and expenses.

In fact, Colorado’s death penalty has led to some taxpayer savings. Just within the past several years, two murder cases in Arapahoe saw the defendants plead guilty to avoid capital punishment.

The claim by some that Colorado’s capital punishment is motivated by race relies upon a debunked 2012 study commissioned by criminal defense attorneys for a two-time murderer trying to avoid the death penalty. The study has been rejected by every Colorado court in which it has been offered. One court found the study “flaw[ed]” and a “red herring.” Another, finding that the study used “a substantially skewed database,” concluded “it is clear it was not an unbiased study, but one designed to provide support for a particular position and designed to reach an anticipated conclusion.”

Three men currently occupy Colorado’s death row. In 1993, Nathan Dunlap tried to murder five people at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant and succeeded in killing four. One teenage victim began to shake her head and pleaded with him “no.” Dunlap said this made him angry. So, he shot her through the top of the head. In 2013, John Hickenlooper intervened to derail the jury’s death sentence for this monster.

More than a decade later, Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray earned death sentences for murdering Gregory Vann, and subsequently murdering the courageous eyewitness to that killing, Javad Marshall-Fields, and his fiancé, Vivian Wolfe. It is a historical anomaly that the only three remaining murderers on death row are Dunlap, Owens, and Ray, all African-American men. In between Dunlap and Owens/Ray, Colorado changed its death penalty sentencing from a jury to a three-judge panel. Numerous other heinous murderers — white, Latino, Asian — faced death sentences in jurisdictions throughout the state, including triple ax murderer Cody Neal in Jefferson County and a killer of his 11-week-old daughter who then bludgeoned a prison guard to death. The Supreme Court declared the panel unconstitutional, automatically converting those sentences to life.

ICYMI: I sought capital punishment for the Aurora theater mass murderer, a white man from upper-middle-class California. A single juror kept him from death row.

If our legislature repeals the death penalty, the death sentences for Dunlap, Owens, and Ray will be converted to mere life sentences, either by Gov. Jared Polis or by the Colorado Supreme Court. The same outcome has followed every legislative repeal across the country.
If the repeal of the death penalty is to be Colorado’s future, it should be Coloradans who repeal it. The legislature should refer repeal to the ballot and trust Coloradans to decide whether to treat all murderers the same or to maintain a tool to distinguish the worst of the worst.

George H. Brauchler is the district attorney for the 18th Judicial District, which includes Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties.
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