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DENVER – Gov. John Hickenlooper has spoken with seven prosecutors and two defense attorneys as well as victims’ families as he ponders whether to grant clemency to Nathan Dunlap, who faces execution in August for ambushing and killing four people in 1993.
The governor’s office provided a list to The Associated Press on Tuesday of 15 officials who were contacted. The list also includes three investigators and a victim-witness assistant in the prosecutor’s office.
Hickenlooper has not said when he will make his decision.
Dunlap has been on death row since 1996, when a jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to die for the shooting deaths of four employees who were cleaning a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in the Denver suburb of Aurora after-hours.
The victims were Ben Grant and Colleen O’Connor, both 17; Sylvia Crowell, 19; and Margaret Kohlberg, 50. Co-worker Bobby Stephens, then 20, was injured but survived.
Dunlap, then 19, had recently lost a job at the restaurant.
A judge has scheduled his execution for the week of Aug. 18, with the day to be set by the head of the Corrections Department. It would be the first execution in Colorado since 1997.
Hickenlooper had resisted releasing the list of people he spoke with, saying some did not want to be identified. A Colorado Open Records Act request by the AP for the names was denied on the grounds that no written list existed.
However, Hickenlooper did agree to release the names of public officials with whom he has consulted.
George Brauchler, district attorney for the 18th Judicial District, where the crime and the trial took place, said he told Hickenlooper he shouldn’t intervene.
“Twenty years of trial work and post-conviction jurisprudence have said the same thing ... the outcome was fair and just,” Brauchler said.
Brauchler said Hickenlooper is acting like a “superjuror” who can overturn the verdict.
Hickenlooper’s spokesman responded that the governor’s role is defined by the state constitution and he is taking his duty seriously by listening to all sides.
Madeline Cohen, one of Dunlap’s attorneys, said Dunlap should be spared because he had undiagnosed bipolar disorder at the time of the crime.
She also said Colorado’s death-penalty system is racially biased, and the sentence is imposed inconsistently across the state. All three people on death row are black, and all were convicted in the 18th District, which includes east and south Denver suburbs.
Brauchler dismissed claims of racial bias as “loose, wild and unsubstantiated.”
Parents of two victims have confirmed they spoke with the governor – Bob and Marj Crowell, parents Sylvia Crowell, and Sandi Rogers, mother of Ben Grant.
Rogers said Wednesday that she told Hickenlooper to let the execution go on as planned.
“I know putting Nathan Dunlap to death is not going to bring my son back,” Rogers said in a telephone interview from her home in Wisconsin. “I also know it is the right thing to do.
“He has outlived my child. He has been in prison longer than my child was on Earth,” she said.
