Bill targets Colorado's death penalty

[struggle4progress]

A bill to be introduced next week would let Colorado use the savings on investigating more than 1,300 cold cases.
By Jessica Fender
The Denver Post

... Johnson and more than 500 others who have lost friends and family to unsolved murders are pushing a plan to end Colorado's death penalty and spend the savings to investigate the state's more than 1,300 cold cases.

The bill, which House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, said he plans to introduce next week, has already sparked opposition from the state's top prosecutors and promises to prompt a political firefight. It threatens to put Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, a former district attorney and a devout Catholic, in tricky territory as well ...

Weissmann, whose 2007 version of the bill narrowly died on the House floor, estimates abolishing capital punishment could save the state $2 million a year and local authorities another $2.5 million ...

Meanwhile, Charles Chaput, archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, supported abolishing the death penalty two years ago, saying that while "long Catholic traditions do support the legitimacy of capital punishment in extraordinary cases, the conditions that would justify its use in developed countries like the United States almost never exist" ...

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_11576540

[El Supremo]

1. A good bill - for a change

I've lived here for 28 years and I think there has been only one person executed during that time.

The legal costs of keeping people on death row is way too much.