AURORA | While one death row inmate argues his case before an Arapahoe County judge, another of the state’s three condemned killers is hoping the highest court in the land will take his case.
Nathan Dunlap, 38, was sentenced to death in 1996 for killing four people at an Aurora restaurant.
Dunlap’s legal team has argued that his trial lawyers botched his trial when they failed to aggressively argue that he was mentally ill. Last summer, an appeals court rejected Dunlap’s argument, leaving him with only the United States Supreme Court as a last-ditch appeal.
The high court has not announced if it will consider Dunlap’s appeal, but the decision is likely to come down in 2013.
Owens and the state’s other two death row inmates — Sir Mario Owens and Robert Ray — were moved in 2011 from the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City to the Sterling Correctional Facility in northeast Colorado.
The move came after Dunlap settled a lawsuit requiring prison officials to let condemned prisoners exercise outside. Dunlap had sued the Colorado Department of Corrections arguing the prison’s policy of restricting death row inmates to a small exercise cell a few times a week was unconstitutional.
The northeast Colorado facility has outdoor, chain-link cells that the inmates can exercise in, prison officials said.
Like Dunlap, Ray and Owens are appealing their convictions.
Two other men could be added to the state’s death row in the coming years as well. Arapahoe County prosecutors could seek the death penalty against James Holmes, who is accused of killing 12 and wounding more than 50 in an Aurora movie theater. Prosecutors also could decide in 2013 to pursue the death penalty against Edward Montour, who was convicted of killing a prison guard at the Limon Correctional Facility in 2002. Montour was previously sentenced to death but the sentence was changed to life in prison when a court ruled it inappropriate because it was handed down by a judge instead of a jury.