This op-ed, written by our Executive Director, appeared in Saturday's Durango Herald:

The death penalty is a broken, costly and barbaric practice that does nothing to deter crime or enhance justice. All too often, it brings about the ultimate injustice: government execution of an innocent person.
Application of the death penalty is highly arbitrary and often biased, depending upon location, money, race, mental illness, the personal judgment of a district attorney and quality of legal representation. As botched executions leave prisoners twitching for hours on their death beds, we should decide to join the rest of the civilized world and end the practice of state-sponsored executions in Colorado and the United States.
Many people believe that death penalty mistakes are extremely rare, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who made the absurd claim in 2006 that felony convictions (including death penalty cases) have an error rate of only 0.027 percent. In reality, 144 prisoners on death row have been positively exonerated during the modern death penalty era in the United States, amounting to 1.6 percent of death sentences. The latest example was just last week, with the release of Manuel Velez in Huntsville, Texas, after nine years of incarceration and four years on death row for a crime that happened while he was a thousand miles away, based on a statement he signed that he was unable to read. A study published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that at least 4.1 percent of prisoners sentenced to death are innocent of their alleged crime – an error rate 150 times what was claimed by Scalia.
Almost certainly, more innocent prisoners are executed or die on death row than are ever released.
Even when a prisoner on death row did commit the crime, there are often underlying issues of untreated mental illness, mental disability or discriminatory application of the death penalty. Even in cases that seem the most justified, pursuing the death penalty perpetuates a system that can and does make irreparable mistakes.
Many people assume that the death penalty at least saves money on incarceration, but exactly the reverse is true. Death penalty cases are extremely expensive, and along with the cost of maintaining death rows and the apparatus and preparation for executions, death penalty sentences cost the state far more than the total cost of lifetime imprisonment without parole. The money saved by ending the death penalty could be used to solve crimes, enhance public safety or treat mental illness.
There is absolutely no evidence that the death penalty deters murder or any other crime; in fact, murder rates are higher on average in states with the death penalty than those without it. A large majority of nations in the world have abolished the death penalty, and those that use it are generally nations with the worst abuses of human rights, such as Iran, Syria, China and North Korea. Is that the company we wish to keep?
The option of the death penalty creates agonizing moral dilemmas for juries and judges, for those who must carry it out and for all whose lives are touched by it. Victims’ families often divide over the issue, while other victims’ families wonder why their loss didn’t qualify as the “worst of the worst.” A quicker sentence of life without parole is much easier on most families than long, public death penalty trials that can turn killers into notorious celebrities.
The very existence of the death penalty is cruel and unusual, and it is long past time to end its use.

(From The Human Race and Other Sports)
By Christopher Brauchli, Human Race & Other Sports

As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it? — William Marcy Tweed, November 1871.

Recent events cause some to wonder whether the literacy tests that voters in some states were required to pass, before voting, from the early 1890s until the 1960s, are preferable to the methods used today to disenfranchise minority voters. Literacy tests were used so that those who were elected to high office could be sure that those who voted for them were literate and fully understood the issues and were not voting on the basis of what they saw in the popular media. A literacy test in Louisiana, for example, consisted of six questions that the prospective voter was given 10 minutes to answer. The instructions advised the test taker to “Be careful as one wrong answer denotes failure of the test.” One of the questions was :“Draw a line under the last word in this line.” Of course the real purpose of literacy tests was to keep the African American and other minority populations from voting. They succeeded. In 1940 only 3% of African Americans in the south were registered to vote.
Ever since passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the disappearance of the literacy tests, Republicans have been fearful that African Americans and other minority voters would not support their candidates. That concern has grown as an increasing number of Hispanic immigrants have moved into the United States. Since literacy tests are no longer allowed, Republicans have come up with three new approaches to dilute the minority vote and, where possible, prevent minorities from voting.
One involves creating voting districts that place, for example, African American voters in highly concentrated districts so that their votes will not dilute votes in the adjoining mostly white districts. On October 7, 2014, a federal appeals court said Virginia’s newly drawn congressional map was unconstitutional because it packed blacks into the 3d District thus diminishing their influence in neighboring districts and violating the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. On October 1, 2014, it was learned that the Florida Supreme Court would hear an appeal pertaining to a Florida Circuit judge’s approval of redrawn maps prepared by the Florida legislature that opponents believe prejudice minority voters.. On June 1, 2014, it was announced that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear two appeals from Alabama in which appellants argue that Republican legislators drew district lines that intentionally marginalized African American voters.
Redrawing districts is not the only substitute for literacy tests used by Republicans to marginalize the effect of increasingly enfranchised minorities. Reducing the number of days for voting is another. Ohio’s secretary of state reduced early voting for the November 2014 elections by one week and eliminated one day of Sunday voting, a day when black churches have traditionally taken congregants to the polls. He also eliminated the week during which voters were permitted to register and vote at the same time. The secretary of state explained that these changes were to reduce the opportunity for “fraud and abuse”. He did, however say that election fraud was “very rare.” On September 29, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court said his changes were fine. That Court also approved North Carolina’s elimination of same-day voter registration and said a lower court was wrong when it ruled that refusal to count votes cast in the wrong precinct would harm minority-voting rights.
Voter ID laws are the third weapon of choice used by Republicans to disenfranchise minority voters while at the same time solving the non-existent problem of voter fraud. In Texas the legislature enacted what is considered the most restrictive voter ID law in the country. It addressed the problem exposed by two convictions for voter impersonation that took place in a 10-year period in Texas during which 20 million non-fraudulent votes were cast. Wisconsin, too, has enacted voter ID laws even though there is no evidence that voter fraud is a problem in that state. In a vigorous dissent from the majority opinion of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Wisconsin’s new strict voter ID law, Judge Richard Posner said that the requirement that voters present photo IDs of themselves in order to vote “has placed an undue burden on the right to vote. . . . Some of the ‘evidence’ of voter-impersonation fraud is downright goofy, if not paranoid. . . . As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem, how can the fact that a legislature says it’s a problem turn it into one? . . . . There is only one motivation for imposing burdens on voting that are ostensibly designed to discourage voter-impersonation fraud, if there is no actual danger of such fraud, and that is to discourage voting by persons likely to vote against the party responsible for imposing the burden.”
Judge Posner got it right. Republicans have it wrong. Perhaps they should see if, with the passage of many years since they were last used, literacy tests would once again pass muster. Here is one question they could use from the old Louisiana test: “Draw a line around the shortest word in this line.” They might even want to impose a requirement that all their candidates pass such a test. Many would not.

October 14, 2014
DENVER – A federal court jury today found Denver sheriff’s deputies used excessive force against Rev. Marvin L. Booker, who died at the Denver Jail in 2010, and awarded Rev. Booker’s family $4.6 million in punitive and compensatory damages.

ACLU of Colorado Executive Director Nathan Woodliff-Stanley issued the following statement:
“The ACLU of Colorado offers somber congratulations to the family of Rev. Marvin L. Booker and the attorneys that delivered justice today in the form of a record judgment against the City of Denver and the sheriff’s deputies who took Rev. Booker’s life.  Marvin Booker was killed by excessive force, and no judgment can change that, but a clear message was sent today that the public demands accountability from law enforcement officers and the officials who oversee them.
“The City of Denver’s internal investigation in 2011 concluded that the deputies violated no policies and would face no discipline for putting the 56 year-old Booker in a chokehold, kneeling on his back while he was pinned to the ground, and shocking him with a taser while he was handcuffed, ultimately causing his death.
“As the ACLU of Colorado noted in our 2011 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, ‘that decision, that a homicide carried out by Sheriff’s deputies carries no consequences, that Denver’s policies allow Sheriff’s deputies to take a prisoner’s life, fueled the already burning outrage in communities policed by Denver Law enforcement, especially among communities of color.’  Today, justice was delivered for the Booker family, but more needs to be done to stop law enforcement misconduct and to ensure that what happened to Marvin Booker does not happen again.
Read the 2011 ACLU letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting an investigation into the pattern and practice of police misconduct and civil rights violations by Denver Law enforcement: https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/co_doj.pdf

Visit our criminal justice page at: https://aclu-co.org/issues/criminal-justice/