Colorado Prosecutors, Race, and the Death Penalty in the Early Part of the 21st Century

Meg Beardsley, Washington and Lee University School of Law, Sam Kamin and Justin F. Marceau, both of the University of Denver College of Law, and Scott Phillips, University of Denver, University of Denver, are publishing Disquieting Discretion: Race, Geography & the Colorado Death Penalty in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century in volume 92 of the Denver University Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

This Article demonstrates through original statistical research that prosecutors in Colorado were more likely to seek the death penalty against minority defendants than against white defendants. Moreover, defendants in Colorado’s Eighteenth Judicial District were more likely to face a death prosecution than defendants elsewhere in the state. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that even when one controls for the differential rates at which different groups commit statutorily death-eligible murders, non-white defendants and defendants in the Eighteenth Judicial District were still more likely than others to face a death penalty prosecution. Even when the heinousness of the crime is accounted for, the race of the accused and the place of the crime are statistically significant predictors of whether prosecutors will seek the death penalty. We discuss the implications of this disparate impact on the constitutionality of Colorado’s death penalty regime, concluding that the Colorado statute does not meet the dictates of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.