New State Death Penalty Bill Advances
Does Colorado need another death penalty bill? A Republican-backed bill to allow the death penalty for those who sexually assault children under 12 is advancing in the state legislature.
A Senate committee has approved a bill that would allow the state to execute people convicted of sexually assaulting children under 12 years old. The bill applies to perpetrators who threaten to retaliate against their victims.
Leaving aside questions of the constitutional validity of the bill, do we really want to pay the tab for the exorbitant legal costs of such proceedings? Doubtful. It's one of the reasons the death penalty is rarely sought and even more rarely attained in Colorado. The bill is expected to fail. What's next for child molesters, a bill to impose a sentence of life plus cancer?
Comments
Submitted by ohwilleke (not verified) on Tue, 2008-03-11 12:08.
Two particular worries:
(1) This creates an incentive to kill the victim in a class of crimes where there is frequently pre-mediation making incentives more important.
(2) This creates an incentive for adults in a household to prevent a crime from being reported (or from preventing DNA evidence that would be necessary to prove the case from being collected), which is critical because 90% of this cases involve acquiantances (often step-parents as in the U.S. Supreme Court test case pending right now, or boyfriends or uncles).
