Contact Us Advertising Information Online exclusives Cover Story Buzz Feature In Case You Missed It Vote 2009 Boulderganic Fall 2009 Student Guide 2009 Boulder Weekly Sweet 16 Anniversary Boulderganic 2009 Summer Scene 2009 Email Newsletter Legal Services Best of Boulder 2009 Annual Manual 2009 Newspaper of the Future Kids Camp Guide 2009 Wedding Marketplace 09 Jobs available Student Guide 2008 Best of Boulder 2008 Annual Manual 2008 Join Our Mailing List
|
March 19-25, 2009
editorial@boulderweekly.com
 Crime and punishment
Can killing Colorado’s death penalty help the state catch murderers?
by Erica Grossman
At 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 13, 1997, Gary Lee Davis sat down to an early evening bowl of ice cream before a visit with his priest and two daughters. After the meeting, at 7:30 p.m., he took a shower and put on a clean set of clothes. Half an hour later, Davis was accompanied down a hallway and led into a special chamber. There, a large curtain was pulled back to reveal an observation room where 11 people sat, staring back at a seated Davis. A brief phone call was made to then-Gov. Roy Romer, who gave the “go-ahead.” At 8:24 p.m., assistants inserted several unmarked IV lines into Davis’ veins. Some contained a harmless saline solution. Others contained sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which mixed in Davis’ bloodstream, depressing his central nervous system and causing his heart to stop beating. At 8:33 p.m., Davis was pronounced dead at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City.
Davis, who had been found guilty of the brutal abduction, rape and murder of Ginny May in 1987, was the first person to be legally executed in Colorado since the 1960s.
Outside the prison gates, a crowd of nearly 200 people had gathered, some pleased by Davis’ death, most silently partaking in a candlelight vigil in opposition to the state-ordered execution.
Eleven years later, on the other side of the state, a far less solemn crowd erupted in applause as a former inmate of that same prison exited a Ft. Collins courtroom. His name was Timothy Masters. On June 22, 2008, he was vacated of the murder conviction of Peggy Hettrick, a 37-year-old woman whose sexually mutilated body was found in 1987 — the same year Davis was sentenced to death.
Masters, who was 15 years old at the time of Hettrick’s murder, was charged, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the act in 1999. He spent the following nine years behind bars before testing confirmed that the DNA evidence found at the scene of the crime did not match Masters’. His conviction was overturned, and he is now a free man.
While the barbarous assaults and murders of Ginny May and Peggy Hettrick have little in common at first glance, they are both connected by a piece of proposed state legislation — House Bill 1274.
The bill, which is slated to go before the House Appropriations Committee within the next two weeks, proposes to abolish the death penalty in the state of Colorado and use the funds saved on capital punishment to pay for a newly formed cold-case unit at the Colorado Bureau of Investigations (CBI).
Advocates of the bill, including its drafter Rep. Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, see this as Colorado’s opportunity to trade our most severe and irreversible form of punishment for a chance at resolving unsolved homicides. Those in opposition denounce HB 1274’s plausibility and morality. Though the discussion behind the death penalty has been a heated philosophical debate in our society for decades, HB 1274 shows that, in the face of a troubled economy, citizens are beginning to consider cost-effectiveness when determining the fate of convicted killers.
Getting colder
Though once thought to be a solved crime, the killer locked up in prison, the case of Peggy Hettrick’s murder has now joined the ranks of the more than 1,400 unsolved homicides in Colorado. Dating back to 1970, this compilation of victims contains many cases considered cold — unresolved, without new leads, and largely abandoned by local and state law enforcement for one reason or another.
To lose a loved one to homicide is enough of a nightmare by itself. But for those cases in which the killer was never caught, family and friends face additional unanswered questions compounded by a lack of faith in the justice system.
Howard Morton knows what this is like. His son, Guy Morton, disappeared in May 1975. Twelve years later, dental records confirmed that the remains of a formerly misidentified body were in fact Guy’s. He had been stabbed in the chest, his body left to rot in the Arizona desert. No murderer has ever been identified or apprehended.
Howard Morton is now executive director for the nonprofit Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons (FHVMP), an
organization dedicated to supporting and empowering the loved ones of murder victims or missing persons whose cases remain unsolved. Morton and FHVMP are a major force behind HB 1274.
But what does going after unsolved homicides have in common with the death penalty?
“As far as we’re concerned, the death penalty as practiced in Colorado is a waste of money,” says Morton on behalf of the FHVMP.
It’s money that would be better used to investigate the state’s numerous unsolved murders, he says.
Two years ago, with the aid of Rep. Joe Rice, D-Littleton, the FHVMP helped to set up a designated cold-case investigative team at the CBI. Unfortunately, due to a lack of funding, that “team” only consists of one person, an analyst who helps compile and confirm a database of victims. The goal of FHVMP is to expand that unit to include at least eight detectives, two criminalists, administrative staff and an investigative travel budget.
And that’s where capital punishment comes in.
In 2006, the FHVMP began to send information to lawmakers about the need for cold-case funding in Colorado. Some of those letters found their way to Rep. Weissmann’s office.
“They kept sending us these letters saying, ‘Did you know that if your kid were murdered in Colorado, there would be a three in 10 chance that the murderer would never be caught?’” recalls Weissmann. “They were sending us these things every two or three weeks, and every once in a while a group will send stuff that hooks you. That’s essentially what happened — they hooked me.”
In 2007, Weissmann met with members of FHVMP and proposed to them this trade: take away the death penalty as a sentencing option and use the enormous amount of money previously involved with death-penalty cases as funding for a cold-case unit.
The FHVMP agreed, and Weissman went to work drafting House Bill 1094.
The argument behind that bill was this: Colorado spends an estimated $2.2 million on costs related to capital punishment each year.
Yet, the state has only executed one person — Gary Lee Davis — in nearly 40 years. If the state abolishes the death penalty, capital punishment-related costs can be reallocated and transferred to a cold-case unit. Hence, more murderers will be caught, and a fiscally inefficient means of punishment will be eradicated.
The projected $2.2 million spent on capital punishment covers a variety of expenses, including public defense and court costs and the very expensive appeals process. Death-penalty conviction appeals are lengthy and last for years, typically resulting in a commuted sentence.
When brought to the legislature two years ago, the House voted in opposition, and HB 1094 was rejected.
Two years later, HB 1274 (an essentially identical bill to the rejected HB 1094) is taking another shot at the same issue.
Weissmann believes his bill has a better chance at passing this time around for a few reasons.
Two years ago, both the Colorado Speaker of the House and Gov. Bill Ritter publicly opposed the HB 1094. Now, the current Speaker supports HB 1274, while Ritter, a former prosecutor, has remained silent on the issue.
Asked if the climate surrounding the current economy — one in which cutbacks, transferring of funds and close analysis of program effectiveness are the order of the day — might increase support for the measure, Weissmann says, “It sure doesn’t hurt.”
“In fact,” he continues, “as the Budget Committee starts looking at how to cut $600 million out of our budget, part of what they’re looking at is sentencing reform — and they’ve put the death penalty on the table as a way to cut money out of the budget.”
Show us the money
Not everyone finds that shifting of funds to be so cut and dry.
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, who once ran the Department of Corrections and who opposes HB 1274, doesn’t believe the transference of money from one area to another is feasible. Both Weissmann and Colorado State Public Defender Doug Wilson estimate that an average of $2.2 million is spent in death-penalty-related costs — the money used by prosecution, defense and appeals courts in those cases.
Suthers and other opponents argue that these expenses are not going anywhere, whether or not the death penalty is abolished.
When asked about the millions of dollars spent on the death penalty, Suthers says, “We spend millions of dollars on our criminal justice system. All of those public defenders involved — if we abolish the death penalty, none of them are going away. The prosecutors are all still going to be there. If we abolish the death penalty, we will have more first-degree murder cases, and those appeals take a long time, too.”
Since Colorado will still employ and pay these same prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges if the bill passes, the notion that any money can be saved by abolishing the death penalty is a false argument, Suthers claims. In fact, he implies that the death penalty might be a way to save money if and when it’s implemented.
“If a person is executed after 10 years [on death row], and he would otherwise be in prison for another 40 years, you’re saving an ungodly amount of money because high-security prison cells cost $60,000 a year,” Suthers says.
The cost of chemicals in Gary Lee Davis’ 1997 lethal injection was $448. The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition estimates that, as of 2009, it costs an average of $28,759 per year to house a prison inmate.
These two cost estimates, however, do not take into account the money spent in the appeals process. Those sentenced to death in Colorado have the right to appeal their conviction and sentence, a process mostly paid for by the state. And still others claim that death-penalty cases do, indeed, cost more.
“It costs about 10 times as much for the public defender’s office to defend a death-penalty case as it does to defend a life-in-prison-without-parole case,” says Weissmann, adding that HB 1274 will save money out of the public defender system and the alternative defense council.
Another facet of HB 1274 will take money out of the Attorney General Suthers’ office, where a Homicide Assistance Unit (HAU) aids district attorneys who ask for the death penalty.
Suthers finds this to be the most ironic facet of HB 1274, since he claims that it is this HAU that “does more good work in cold cases than just about anybody in the state.”
This HAU is the unit involved with the Peggy Hettrick murder investigation and, according to Suthers, commits hundreds of hours to cold-case training around the state.
To kill or not to kill
Possibly the biggest flaw in the funding argument may be the argument itself. Some contend that making a decision about the implementation or abolishment of capital punishment should be based on philosophical and moral debate, not fiscal viability.
In other words, if it is morally correct to impose the death sentence on a convicted killer, then the state should be obligated to provide
that option regardless of the expense.
There are a multitude of established reasons provided by death-penalty advocates for supporting capital punishment. Some say that it is a public extension of self-defense, a notion made popular by philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Others contend that the death penalty serves as a form of deterrence — one might not commit a heinous act if he or she knows that it may result in a death sentence. And many support the idea that it is simply a fair punishment for anyone who has willfully taken another’s life. An eye for an eye, as the saying goes.
Suthers believes that there are at least three occurrences in which the death penalty is a more appropriate societal response than life in prison. The first is an instance of mass terrorism, in which an individual kills many people by, for example, detonating a bomb in a highly populated building. The second is a situation in which an inmate already serving a life sentence commits the premeditated murder of a correctional officer. And the third involves killers who are already facing life in prison who have witnesses against them murdered on their behalf.
In the latter two examples, Suthers believes the lack of a death penalty leaves little incentive for people to not murder.
But the moral arguments against the death penalty are also compelling. Opponents of capital punishment proclaim that the death penalty is not a deterrent, that many people who kill do so with little thought to their future punishment. This argument, which would counteract Suthers’ last two examples, maintains that no matter what the punishment, many murderers find little incentive to not murder. Others claim that it is not the position of the state to determine who lives and who dies and that state-sanctioned killing may actually lead to a blurred public perception of when and where killing is acceptable.
But one major force behind revoking capital punishment lies in the fact that it is an irreversible action. In the cases in which people are wrongfully convicted of crimes, only later to have their innocence revealed, they can be released from prison. They cannot, however, be brought back from death. Though it may seem unlikely that the death penalty would ever currently be imposed in any case that lacked overwhelming physical evidence, the fact remains that it is possible. Juries are not infallible, and, as rare an occurrence as it may be, innocent people are sometimes convicted and sentenced for crimes that they did not commit.
It’s an argument that has much to do with why Timothy Masters is a free man, and why the murder of Peggy Hettrick is again an unsolved crime awaiting resolution in Suthers’ office.
Vengeance vs. justice
While people on both sides of the issue can debate the principles of capital punishment to ad infinitum, the heart of the issue for lawmakers and for the public seems to be how the death penalty is implemented and whether it is effective. Colorado is one of seven states pushing to abolish the death penalty on the grounds of cost. As of press time, New Mexico is only waiting for Gov. Bill Richardson’s signature to overturn capital punishment after its state legislature passed a bill eradicating the death penalty for financial reasons. Including New Mexico, 36 states still have the death penalty on the books as a legal method of punishment.
For those states, the debate is coming down to effectiveness. Regardless of the moral debate behind it, lawmakers are asking themselves whether or not the death penalty works.
“We’ve executed one person in four decades,” says Wilson. “And when you compare the cost of the death penalty to the benefit of using that money to solve the 1,400 unsolved homicides in the state, I see no rational reason for continuing to spend $2.2 million — just on the defense side — for a punishment that is not a deterrent, that is simply not effective.”
Suthers and other death-penalty advocates argue that the infrequent use of Colorado’s death penalty is a positive thing and not a
reason to eradicate it from the system.
“The fact that we don’t use it very often is an indication that we’re very thoughtful about it,” Suthers says. “We need to reserve it for these types of cases where a life imprisonment would be nothing more than a slap on the wrist.”
But supporters of the bill maintain that its infrequent use, compounded with its cost, is exactly the reason to eradicate capital punishment.
“We don’t use the death penalty here in Colorado,” says Weissmann. “The prosecutors will say that’s good, because we’re very judicious in it. Well, we’re judicious in its application at a huge financial expense. It’s something that I’m willing to give up and that is very easy to give up.”
And giving up state-ordered executions of murderers is something that many families of murder victims are willing to give up, as well.
This past October, the FHVMP polled its members as to whether they would be willing to take the death penalty off of the table — even for the murderer of their loved one, should the killer be apprehended — in exchange for cold-case investigation funding. Of the 250 people asked, 83 percent were willing to make the trade.
“To us, the question of ‘Do you favor the death penalty or do you oppose it?’ is a stupid question,” says Morton, “because we haven’t even caught our murderers. They haven’t been arrested. They haven’t been prosecuted. What the hell does the death penalty mean to us?”
Respond:letters@boulderweekly.com
back to top
|
| |
