Possibility remains despite repeal vote

Gov. Jared Polis could abolish the death penalty this month even as an Adams County man faces a death sentence in connection with the shooting death of sheriff’s Deputy Heath Gumm.

The death penalty repeal, which was approved by the state legislature in February, would apply only to cases that are filed on or after July 1, which means defendants who already are facing capital punishment and those who are charged with capital crimes in the next four months still could be sentenced to die. Polis is expected to sign the bill.

The trial starts Monday for 24-year-old Dreion Dearing, who is accused of killing Gumm in January 2018 during a chase. Jury selection is expected to last several weeks because it is a death penalty case, said Sue Lindsay, spokeswoman for 17th Judicial District Attorney Dave Young.

There is nothing legally pre

venting the district attorney from pursuing the death penalty in Dearing’s case, but some experts said a death sentence in a state that has abolished capital punishment is meaningless and that continuing to pursue it in Dearing’s case creates a needless expense to taxpayers.

“The odds of him being executed are about the same as two feet of snow falling in Miami tonight,” said Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado Boulder professor who wrote a book on the history of the death penalty in Colorado. He called Young’s decision to pursue the death penalty an “abuse of power.”

“To put a new guy on death row right now, it just bogs down the appellate court,” Radelet said. “It’s a waste of everybody’s time. I hate to be political, but there are three reasons for the death penalty right now. One is politics. Two is politics, and three is politics.”

Lindsay declined to comment on the district attorney’s pursuit of the death penalty in Dearing’s case, but when Young announced his decision in 2018, she said the district attorney made the call after discussion with Gumm’s family and because of aggravating factors in the case, including the death of a law enforcement officer.

Across the United States, it’s not uncommon for capital criminal cases to be underway when a state mounts an effort to abolish the death penalty, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Typically, he said, prosecutors will try to delay a pending case until it becomes clear whether capital punishment will be allowed going forward.

“Why would you spend enormous amounts of taxpayer money to attempt to obtain a death verdict when the state is about to abolish that policy?” he asked, adding that delaying such cases gives prosecutors the chance to press forward with the death penalty in the event it is not abolished.

“It’s a whole different ballgame if Gov. Polis vetoes the bill,” Dunham said. “The governor certainly will have either signed it or not signed it by the time the jury selection is complete, and at that point, we’ll see whether this is anything more than a symbolic protest at taxpayers’ expense.”

In many states, death sentences have been commuted to life in prison after capital punishment is repealed, Radelet said. Polis has not said whether he will commute the sentences of the three men on Colorado’s death row but has said he will do a “thorough and rigorous” review of their cases.

Of the three on Colorado’s death row, one man’s execution was indefinitely stayed by then-Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2013, and the other two cases are pending. The last execution in Colorado was in 1997.

Aside from Dearing, the only other defendant in the state facing the death penalty in a pending case is 23year-old Marco Antonio Bravo Garcia, accused of killing two Colorado Springs high school students in 2017, said Denise Maes, public policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. His trial is scheduled for July.

Prosecutors in Douglas County must also must decide by Thursday whether to pursue the death penalty against Devon Erickson, who is charged in the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting.

Colorado juries have been hesitant to hand out death sentences in recent years and declined to do so for James Holmes, who killed 12 people at an Aurora theater, and Dexter Lewis, who stabbed five people to death at a Denver bar.

Staff writer Alex Burness contributed to this report.