AURORA | Lawyers for Nathan Dunlap on Wednesday rejected the district attorney’s argument that race isn’t a factor in Colorado’s death row cases.
In an eight-page letter to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Dunlap’s lawyers, who are asking the governor to spare the quadruple murderer’s life, said the state’s capital punishment system is rife with problems, including a dramatic racial disparity.
All three men on Colorado’s death row are black, and death penalty opponents have long argued that the racial makeup of condemned inmates is indicative of a system that unfairly hands out harsher punishment for black inmates than it does white inmates.
“Allowing Nathan Dunlap to be executed will legitimize and perpetuate that broken system,” the letter said.
In their letter to Hickenlooper last week, Arapahoe County prosecutors said it was “vile,” to argue that race played a role in Dunlap’s 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 death sentences were later overturned by courts for various reasons.
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.
And, the defense argued prosecutors used racially charged language in their closing arguments at Dunlap’s 1996 trial when they referred to the victims as “normal white middle class” people.