May 01, 2009 04:07 PM UTC

Ritter: I Never Promised To Sign Death Penalty Repeal

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• by: Colorado Pols

Responding directly to claims made by our readers, Politics West reports:

House Bill 1274, which would repeal the death penalty, awaits a hearing in a Senate committee. The former prosecutor, however, denied assertions made on a Democratic blog site that he had committed to signing such a death penalty repeal bill during his 2006 campaign.

“I have not committed to signing it,” Ritter said. “It is a bill where I have committed to listening to the people who will be making the case (and) others who are opposed to it. There was a great deal of testimony on both sides of this.

“I’ll do what I do in these kinds of situations where people have requested to talk to me before I make my decision.”

To be clear, we (meaning your humble hosts) never mentioned this alleged promise in any of our postings on House Bill 1274. But a number of our readers did in comments, in sufficient numbers and from enough unconnected circles that we’d say it’s a common perception–many people believe Ritter did make this campaign promise in 2006.

And now he says he didn’t. Either he’s wrong, or several of our generally-reliable community members are independently wrong–we’ll rely on that same community to crowdsource the truth of the matter, and let the chips fall where they may.