Death penalty foe trying new tack

Alan Gathright, Rocky Mountain News

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Louisville lawmaker who tries but fails each year to repeal Colorado's death penalty plans a back-door approach today.

Rep. Paul Weissmann, a Democrat, said he hopes to persuade colleagues to eliminate the attorney general's four-person capital crimes unit.

That would shift the burden of costly death penalty prosecutions and appeals to district attorneys, and if that didn't wipe out capital punishment altogether, it would at least save the state $360,000 a year, Weissmann said. That money would be used instead to investigate cold cases under Weissmann's plan.

His House Bill 1094 is stalled in the Appropriations Committee.

Weissmann acknowledges that he has gotten no traction for his bill to bring an end to the rarely used capital punishment.

"If it's unamended, it will die in committee," he said Tuesday. "I don't have the votes or (support of) the governor."

Instead, Weissmann proposes one amendment that would wipe out the attorney general's capital crimes unit, generating a $360,000 annual savings for the cold-case unit and state crime laboratory improvements.

He said he thinks he might have a winner with the alternative amendment: reducing the attorney general's capital crimes staff to two - the number of state death row inmates. That would generate $180,000 annually in savings to solve cold-case killings and crime lab expansion.

But Attorney General John Suthers might say that HB 1094 or its amendments will pass over his dead body. "If we have the death penalty in this state, we need to have adequate resources to prosecute those cases," said Suthers' spokesman, Nate Strauch. "We certainly do not support either of the amendments."