The news concludes a legislative effort that began in earnest in 2007
Colorado governor Jared Polis. Photo: Jason Connolly/AFP via Getty Images Colorado has officially repealed the death penalty. Governor Jared Polis, following his own public-health guidelines aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus, announced his signing of SB20-100 in a press release rather than at a big table surrounded by advocates and hand-shaking cabinet members, according to Colorado Public Radio. .
That resistance was overwhelmed in the lead-up to Monday’s legislation. A key procedural vote in January advanced the bill from the State Senate, where it faced its fiercest adversaries, to the House of Representatives, where observers predicted it would have a much easier path forward. Three Senate Republicans co-sponsored the bill, despite promises from their House colleagues that they’d do whatever they could to stop it getting to the governor’s desk.
Capital punishment in the state had been under official moratorium until this week. This is consistent with a nationwide decline in its usage. Almost two decades of downward trends saw annual executions in the United States fall from their peak of 98 in 1999 to 25 in 2018.
These arguments are myriad. Capital punishment is overwhelmingly racist in application, and the United States is the only developed economy besides Japan to use it. It’s not a demonstrated deterrent against crime, and is notoriously error-prone; a 2014 study from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that at the current rate at which death-row inmates are being exonerated, 4.
By rejecting these moral acrobatics, Colorado has become the latest of 22 U.S. states to have abolished it. Three others have it under governor-imposed moratoriums, meaning the country is split evenly between states that use capital punishment and those that do not. For advocates, it’s a corrective to years of misguided thinking. “I think [other survivors] have been led by prosecutors and politicians and sometimes family members too, to this hope that they’re going to find peace.
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