Ending A Broken System: Colorado’s Expensive, Ineffective and Unjust Death Penalty

Ending A Broken System: Colorado’s Expensive, Ineffective and Unjust Death Penalty is a report based on an eight-month ACLU campaign to end the death penalty in Colorado. In addition to the numerous stories of grief and the toll on innocent lives, the report contains detailed data that underscores why the death penalty is a flawed and broken system, including expense, racial bias, cruel and unusual application and it’s ineffectiveness in deterring crime.

The report finds that a death penalty sentence risks making irreversible mistakes. A wave of exonerations in the U.S. proves that the death penalty is often applied to the innocent. When carried out, executions using untested, increasingly unavailable drugs are often botched, torturing defendants and traumatizing corrections officers. Ending a Broken System illustrates that the death penalty is a bloated government program that consumes police time and wastes millions of dollars that could be invested in solving cold cases or expanding services for victims’ families. A death penalty sentence in Colorado depends more on the color of your skin, socio-economic status, quality of your attorney, and where you live than on the seriousness of your crime.