One cynical strategy against the death penalty that we are seeing around the country these days is to pick out a worthy government function that is presently being underfunded and introduce a bill to cut or eliminate the death penalty and fund the other project. The fallacy is that pairing up budget items like this is artificial. An increase in any budget item could be funded by making cuts anywhere in the vast state budget. Sacrificing justice in the worst of all criminal cases would be needed only after all lower priority items have been eliminated from the budget, a circumstance which has not occurred in any state government in modern times.

The Colorado House of Representatives saw through this scheme and voted down, 35-30, a bill to cut state's capital case staff and fund a cold case unit instead. Funding a cold case unit is probably a good cause, but surely the money to do so can be found somewhere else in the budget. Alan Gathright reports for the Rocky Mountain News here.