AURORA | Arapahoe County prosecutors on Friday urged Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper to rebuff Nathan Dunlap’s request for mercy and let the convicted killer be executed.
In a 32-page response to Dunlap’s clemency request, prosecutors argued that the brutality of Dunlap’s crime, his lack of remorse, and the fact that several courts have already upheld his death sentence mean the governor should resist calls to step in.
“He took the lives of four Colorado citizens and justice requires he now pays with his own,” prosecutors wrote.
Dunlap, 39, was convicted of killing four at an Aurora Chuck E. Cheese in 1993 and has largely exhausted his appeals, leaving clemency as the defense’s last and best option as they try to spare his life.
Dunlap’s defense team last week formally asked Hickenlooper to step in and stop Dunlap’s execution, which a judge has scheduled for August. In a 25-page clemency petition, Dunlap’s lawyers said his diagnosed bipolar disorder, family history of abuse and mental illness, as well as the flawed way Colorado uses the death penalty mean the governor should let Dunlap spend the rest of his life behind bars.
The defense has long argued that Colorado’s death penalty is doled out unfairly, with all three defendants on death row coming from Aurora, and all three being black.
But prosecutors called those arguments “vile,” and said any prosecutor faced with a case involving a killer who ambushed five people, killing four of them and wounding a fifth, would have sought the death penalty. The fact that all of the state’s death row are black and come from the same judicial district is the fault of the killers, not the prosecutors who tried them, prosecutors wrote.
Race was never a consideration in any of the three cases, they argued.
“It is unimaginable that a Governor of Colorado could even listen to such an argument from killer’s lawyers without revulsion,” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors also included two letters urging Hickenlooper to deny clemency, one from Aurora state Rep. Rhonda Fields, whose son, Javad Marshall-Fields, was gunned down in 2005 before he could testify in a murder case. Robert Ray and Sir Mario Owens, the men who killed Fields’ son, are the other two men on Colorado’s death row.
Dunlap has said he killed the four people inside Chuck E. Cheese because they were witnesses to his crimes, a point Fields argued makes execution the only appropriate punishment.
“Governor, I know that you are greatly troubled by this decision and I respect that. However, Dunlap’s sentence has been approved by the courts for almost two decades; and I believe that it is appropriate,” she said. “I think that granting clemency would send the wrong message to criminals and to witnesses, and I urge you to deny it.”
The other letter came from the foreman on Ray’s jury, whose name was redacted from the letter released to the media Friday.
The foreman, who has spoke publicly before and defended his jury’s decision in the Ray case, urged Hickenlooper to let stand the decisions Dunlap’s jury made 20 years ago.
The foreman also took the governor to task for recent gun-control measures signed into law.
“After you reduced freedoms I had before, and told me that I can’t be trusted with more than fifteen bullets, are you now going to say that the mass shooter wins? This was Aurora’s original mass shooting. Now is your chance to show you were serious about mass shootings in Colorado, and not merely offering up my state as some sort of gun control trophy,” he wrote.
don’t cave in to the race baiters……….