By Matt Masich, LAW WEEK COLORADO
Colorado law does not impose a strict two-year limit on death penalty appeals, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday.
Counsel for Sir Mario Owens, who was convicted of two counts of murder in 2008 and sentenced to death, challenged the statutory scheme for reviewing death penalty cases.
Before the sentence was handed down, Owens’ lawyers argued that it was unconstitutional for state law to impose a two-year time limit on the completion of all proceedings for post-conviction review, the certification of the record, and all appellate briefing. They also argued that the law unconstitutionally prohibited extensions of any kind beyond the two-year limit.
Arapahoe County District Judge Gerald Rafferty ruled that the two-year limit was valid, but he found the prohibition on time extensions unconstitutionally arbitrary and capricious.
The Colorado Supreme Court unanimously reversed Rafferty’s ruling. The trial court misconstrued statute as imposing an absolute two-year limit for appeals, wrote Justice Nathan Coats.
Because the statute “implements the legislature’s direction by imposing a series of highly specific time limits, which are designed to meet the two-year goal when, but only when, that can be accomplished without violating the defendant’s constitutional rights or the legislature’s other expressly articulated goals, no absolute two-year time limit exists in either statute or rule.”
