PERRY: Snuff is a snuff; Aurora is ready to tell the state to end the death penalty

So Aurora gets to answer the million-dollar question for all of Colorado: keep on murdering convicts or end the death penalty?

This year, two Aurora state lawmakers are sponsoring bills that could end capital punishment in Colorado.

Beyond the fact that Aurora’s state Sen. Morgan Carroll and state Rep. Rhonda Fields are the two lawmakers trying to bring attention to the issue, the real crux of the story is that the heinous murderers occupying death row hail from Aurora. Nathan Dunlap has been sleeping on death row since 1996, after being convicted of killing four fellow employees during the 1993 Chuck E. Cheese’s massacre. Ironically, the other two death-row inmates murdered Fields’ son and his fiance in 2005. It was that murder and trial that converted Fields from being just another Aurora mom into an eventual candidate for the state House. While Fields said she believes in retaining the death penalty because it provides a sense of justice for victims, she’s willing to let voters decide the issue.

Carroll wants state lawmakers to do what they narrowly didn’t in 2009.

So here’s the deal. Many in the state are looking to Fields, to Carroll, to other Aurora lawmakers, to you and to me as a gauge of whether it’s time to undo a complicated tangle of myth, unfairness, emotion, money and humanity. If the residents and leaders of the community that has weathered the unspeakable horrors inflicted by Nathan Dunlap, Sir Mario Owens, Robert Ray, and now Aurora theater shooter James Holmes, can see the wisdom of ending the death penalty, the rest of the state should have no qualms.

We can make this happen. All you have to do is look at the facts, and here they are:

The death penalty does not prevent crime. This myth is hard to dispel because it makes sense to people who don’t commit crimes. Study after study shows that the death penalty does not affect murder rates. The landmark 2009 Smart on Crime Study goes even further. Police chiefs agree the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. In Colorado alone, just keeping capital punishment on the books costs state taxpayers more than $1 million a year above what we’re already spending on prosecuting murder cases.

If you don’t believe me or endless studies, just look to Texas, where residents there have a better chance of being executed than winning the lottery. Murder in Texas rises like the sun.

Here’s more: Death row is a place filled mostly by poor, black and Hispanic men. It’s not because they murder people more than white people do, but they don’t have lawyers that get them off.

More? We make mistakes in the justice system — lots of them. Since 1976, there are at least 140 death-row exonerations when it turned out cops got the wrong guy. Really.

Still more? It’s not an effective bargaining chip for prosecutors trying to make plea deals. This dubious claim by district attorneys starts out by being unethical at best. Bargaining with someone’s life rather than the facts of the case is just plain sick, and it’s just the kind of thing that fills death row with poor minorities. And there is nothing but anecdotal wishing to back this claim up. Police from all over the country sniff at the claim, saying they see nothing but extra work when a DA invokes the death penalty.

Here are the biggy, folks. There is no justice in murdering criminals. Oh, it’s murder. Intentionally killing someone who doesn’t want to die is what murder is all about. It’s just that state-sponsored executions are justified murders. And we try to make them nice and neat and clean for the public by hiding them in prison killing rooms, pretending that we’re just putting people to sleep for being the worst of the worst. But no matter how hard we try, we can never run from the fact that, as a society, as a freakin’ planet, we all agree that killing people outside of self-defense is wrong. Dead wrong. It’s so barbaric, that the only remaining countries that do it are places like China, Iran, Vietnam — and us.

I understand the emotion behind it, for Fields, and for many others. If someone were to kill my daughter, even by accident, I would want them dead. I doubt that I would hesitate to beat them to death myself. I would be unable to stop myself. Society has to do that. But even if I did snuff my child’s murderer, she’d still be dead, and I would have joined the ranks of her murderer. That’s not justice, that’s the last remnants of a society acting like a hurting adolescent. Killing killers does nothing to make us safer or more satisfied. It costs us hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and our humanity.

It’s up to us, Aurora. Call on yourself, call your elected leaders and the governor. Tell them Aurora is ready, and that the next move, out of the darkness, is theirs.

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com

Here are some resources for info on the death penalty:

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/home

https://www.coadp.org/