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Death-penalty trade-off

Saturday, February 24 at 12:01 AM

By Michael L. Radelet

In the early 1960s, law enforcement solved more than nine out of 10 homicides in the U.S. By 1976, the FBI reports, the clearance rate was 76 percent. By 2004 it had fallen to 63 percent. During this legislative session, Colorado has the opportunity to become one of our nation’s leaders in doing something about this growing rate of unsolved homicides.

Earlier this month, a bill sponsored by Rep. Paul Weissman, D-Louisville, that would substantially increase the funding for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation passed through the House Judiciary Committee. The money would allow the CBI to beef up its forensic unit and chemistry labs, and direct them to create a “cold case unit” to investigate unresolved homicide cases. Local law enforcement agencies and the family of the victim could both petition the CBI for assistance.

One innovative feature of the bill is that it identifies how the project will be funded. It would do so by abolishing the death penalty, which in the past three decades has done nothing but waste millions of dollars of taxpayers' money with nothing to show for it in terms of crime reduction or in assistance for families of the victims.

To be sure, some families of homicide victims support the death penalty, as do many citizens when we hear about the brutal murders that took away their loved ones. But most of the families whose cases remain unsolved are willing to forgo the death penalty in exchange for a renewed commitment to find the killers.

After all, the question of how to punish the killer is irrelevant if the killer has not been captured.

Colorado’s death penalty, often justified as a way to help families of homicide victims, is a farce. Two former graduate students and I published a paper about it in last summer’s Colorado Law Review. We focused on the 3,993 homicides in Colorado over a 20-year period, 1980 to 1999. During those years, the death penalty was sought in 110 cases and imposed 13 times. Of the 13 men sent to death row, one was executed here, one was executed for a previous death sentence in Texas, and one other still sits on death row. The rest died of natural causes or had their death sentences vacated by appellate courts. Colorado’s only other death-row inmate went there after firing his lawyer and pleading guilty to killing a prison guard in 2002.

By any measure, one execution and two death-row inmates after 4,000 murders is a terribly low success rate. If Colorado’s death-penalty prosecutors were making widgets in a factory, they would have been put out of business long ago.

All this fighting over death sentences comes with a steep price tag for Colorado taxpayers. Some responsible estimates put the per-execution price tag at several million dollars above life imprisonment without parole. And make no mistake about it: Those convicted of first-degree murder in Colorado will die in prison. All the fuss about the death penalty is really only about when and how that death will happen.

No criminological research supports the idea that the death penalty deters crime. But Weissman’s bill will help reduce our homicide rate by increasing the probability that the killers will be caught. The deterrent effect of any punishment is more related to the certainty of punishment than the severity.

Yet, some of those prosecutors who have bungled and exploited the death penalty are arguing it still should be retained. Some prosecutors have argued that HB 1094 presents a “false dilemma” by using the savings from the abolition of the death penalty to fund case squads. What they can’t explain is where else the money to fund cold-case squads would come from. They can’t show us the money, because it isn’t there, and they know it.

Of course, many in our society support the death penalty. Weissman’s bill is not based on flat-out opposition to capital punishment. It is based on the realization that whatever benefit the death penalty has (if any), it simply is not worth the money and the hassle. The bill is a compromise, with the winners being families of homicide victims and all of us who want to see more killers brought to justice.

In the end, the money now spent on capital prosecutions would be better spent on stepping up our efforts to solve some of the hundreds of homicides in Colorado where the killer has not yet been prosecuted.

Michael L. Radelet is chair of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Department of Sociology. He is an expert on the death penalty, and a board member of Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons.

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