The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee voted down a bill Wednesday that would have made it less difficult for juries to deliver the death sentence in Colorado.

Opponents of the bill who packed the hearing room celebrated the committee’s decision and the swing vote cast by Chairperson Ellen Roberts, a Republican from Durango.

“I was dumbfounded by the result of the Holmes trial,” Roberts explained before casting her vote, referring to the two-years-long court battle to win the death sentence for Aurora Theater shooter James Holmes. The trial ended last August when the jury imposed a life sentence without parole. Tom Sullivan, father of Alex Sullivan, who was killed in the shooting, gave emotional testimony in support of the bill.

“I was moved by Mr. Sullivan’s testimony about the intentional and horrific murders and the loss of his son,” Roberts said. “I support the death penalty, but I believe we have to meet the highest procedural threshold.”

Senate Bill 64, sponsored by Sen. Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, aimed to eliminate the state requirement that 12 jurors unanimously agree to impose a death penalty. The bill originally would have reduced the required number of jurors in agreement to nine, but Lundberg introduced an amendment at the opening of the hearing raising his proposed number to 11.

There is “a flaw” in the sentencing phase of capital cases, Lundberg told the committee members. That final phase of a jury’s deliberations is more subjective and, in the Holmes trial, “we (saw) it fail,” he said. “I believe state policy should be adjusted.”

“There should be a very high bar” when it comes to imposing a death sentence, he said, “but one that’s attainable.”

Only three capital punishment states do not require unanimous death penalty sentencing decisions — Florida, Alabama and Delaware. According to the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, all of those states now are reconsidering their sentencing systems, and one of them is currently considering eliminating the death penalty altogether.

Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman, D-Denver, strongly opposed the bill, agreeing with others at the hearing that it ran counter to growing national support for efforts to either do away with the death penalty altogether or to tighten up justice systems that have led to false convictions and a rash of death-row exonerations.

“This would move (the process) in a direction that doesn’t respect the jury system we have — the minds and the hearts of all of the 12 jurors,” she said.

Opponents of the measure protested outside the hearing room, waving homemade posters along the street and from the building steps.

Some suspected the bill was intended at least partly to rally conservative voters in an intense presidential-election year.

Others derided it as the “George Brauchler do-over bill.”

Brauchler is the Arapahoe District Attorney who tried and failed to land the death sentence for Holmes. Although Holmes agreed early in the court proceedings to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, Brauchler pressed the case. As Lundberg pointed out at the hearing Wednesday, Brauchler won a unanimous guilty verdict but lost in the sentencing phase of the multimillion dollar trial.

After the hearing, Lundberg told The Colorado Statesman that the bill came from his heart, that the topic wasn’t something his constituents or colleagues were pressing. He said he simply felt the state had a death penalty system that no longer functioned, one that had slipped over the years into a policy in name only.

“Is the death penalty in Colorado a reality or is it a fiction?” he said.

The hearing was the latest back and forth in the “statewide conversation” on the death penalty called for by Gov. John Hickenlooper in 2013 after he granted a “temporary reprieve” to Nathan Dunlap, who was convicted of murdering four people in an Aurora pizza restaurant in 1993. Dunlap’s scheduled execution would have been the first in the state in 15 years.

In explaining his decision to grant the reprieve, Hickenlooper cited mounting evidence that capital punishment has been applied unreliably and inequitably for decades, targeting poor, ethnic minority, and mentally ill defendants.

“Such a level of punishment really does demand perfection,” he said.

The judiciary committee voted 3-2 against Lundberg’s bill. Lundberg, who is a member of the committee, and Sen. John Cooke, R-Greeley, voted in favor. Cooke was one of the bill’s co-sponsors.

— john@coloradostatesman.com