AURORA | In a state where just four percent of the population is black, black men make up 100 percent of death row.
That roster of men sentenced to die includes Nathan Dunlap, who is set for execution in August and whose lawyers are pointing to death row’s dramatic racial disparity as a reason to spare the quadruple killer’s life.
“Allowing Nathan Dunlap to be executed will legitimize and perpetuate that broken system,” the lawyers wrote in a letter to Gov. John Hickenlooper last week, urging him to grant Dunlap clemency.
The letter came in response to a letter from Arapahoe County prosecutors, who said it was “vile” to argue Dunlap’s race played a role in his sentence.
“It is unimaginable that a Governor of Colorado could even listen to such an argument from killer’s lawyers without revulsion,” prosecutors wrote.
The prosecution argued that several white and Hispanic defendants have been sentenced to death in Colorado, but each of those sentences were later overturned by courts.
“Nathan Dunlap happens to be an African-American male. Nathan Dunlap’s victims happened to be Caucasian,” prosecutors wrote. “Had Nathan Dunlap been Caucasian and executed four African-American victims, he would still be on death row. We know this to be true.”
But Dunlap’s defense team argued that even when considering the six death penalty cases the prosecution cited, Colorado is still more likely to sentence a minority defendant to die than a white defendant. Of those six cases, two defendants were Hispanic, and one was black, giving the state’s roster of condemned inmates a higher proportion of minorities than the state as a whole.
“The fact that white defendants have been sentenced to death in the past, as the rebuttal stresses, cannot blind us to present-day realities,” the defense said. And, the defense argued prosecutors used racially charged language in their arguments at Dunlap’s 1996 trial when they referred to the victims as “normal white middle class” people.
In a state where executions are exceedingly rare, the lack of data make it tough to draw meaningful conclusions. For example, while 100 percent of the current death row roster is black, 100 percent of people Colorado has executed since 1976 were white, with Gary Lee Davis the only person executed in that time frame.
Still, Dunlap’s lawyers have pointed to several studies that say black defendants and defendants who kill white people are more likely to be sentenced to death. According to one study, from 1980 to 1999, 11 of the 13 people sentenced to death in Colorado were convicted of killing white people.