The statewide conversation on capital punishment promised more than two years ago, when Gov. John Hickenlooper granted a death-row inmate a temporary reprieve, hasn’t materialized in the way some had hoped.

But the life sentences that jurors recently handed down to two of the state’s most heinous mass murderers have jump-started debate on the death penalty’s future in a state that rarely uses it.

Prosecutors in both cases said death was the only appropriate sentence for the two men — and two-thirds of Coloradans polled in a survey during the Aurora theater trial agreed.

But the eventual actions of the 24 jurors in the two cases — although the precise breakdown for each remains unclear — re-energized the discussion over a punishment gathering resistance nationally.

By any measure, the crimes, three months apart in 2012, were devastating in their scope: 12 shot dead and 70 wounded inside a movie theater; five stabbed to death in a Denver bar later set ablaze.

For some, the verdicts in the James Holmes and Dexter Lewis trials underscore long-standing issues: Is the death penalty worth the expense when it’s so seldom used? Should a single juror be able to nullify a death sentence? Should Colorado join the national trend toward repeal?

For others, the cases demonstrate that the system worked exactly as it should.

One week after the final verdict was read in the theater shooting case, Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler sat in his Centennial office, reflecting on reports that a single juror voted for a life sentence for Holmes.

Had the majority of the jury come back in favor of life, Brauchler might have second-guessed his decision to seek the death penalty.

But not for one juror.

“Do you re-evaluate policy for an entire state, an entire system, off one juror?” Brauchler said. “The death penalty is rock solid in the state, and everything was done right.”

Weeks later, after a Denver judge read the verdict forms that spared Lewis’ life in the bar murders, Chief Deputy District Attorney Joe Morales balanced his disappointment against the wider implications of the jury’s decision.

“If you cannot get 12 people to agree beyond a reasonable doubt that the person should lose their life for their crimes, then it should not be imposed,” Morales said. “This was a great day for justice.”

But what about the day after? And the day after that?

Broader conversation?

Colorado’s top public defender has been awaiting a broader conversation about the death penalty for more than two years.

“There needs to be an honest, open, frank discussion about the different components of the death penalty,” Colorado Public Defender Doug Wilson said recently.

Wilson oversaw the teams of public defenders in the Aurora and Denver cases and felt that justice was served.

Still, he said, the system should be examined — and the governor should fulfill the promise he made when he granted the reprieve to death-row inmate Nathan Dunlap three months before he was scheduled to die for killing four people in 1993 at a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant in Aurora.

“That discussion has not occurred,” said Wilson, envisioning a statewide commission to address all aspects of the issue.

Hickenlooper, who had reserved comment until after the state’s two capital cases were resolved, makes his case against the death penalty on the front page of Sunday’s Perspective section in The Denver Post — but he stops short of any direct recommendation for repeal.

“The death penalty does not make our homes or our state any safer,” he writes. “Life in prison without hope of parole is just and harsh punishment.”

For the moment, what the discussion lacks in structure, it makes up for in immediacy. And for Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver, the two juries’ decisions reflected an evolving public attitude toward capital punishment.

“I think that there’s clearly an ambivalence about the death penalty in Colorado,” he said.

The death penalty, Kamin said, has been a moving target for decades, and as discussions resume in Colorado, those involved should be asking: What do we think we’re getting from the death penalty?

“Right now, we have an expensive system that doesn’t execute anyone,” Kamin said.

Kamin co-authored a study examining the nexus between race, geography and Colorado’s death penalty from 1999 to 2010. The study, which was released during the theater trial, concluded that the death penalty in Colorado is sought too infrequently and is applied so arbitrarily across racial and geographic lines that it is unconstitutional.

But Kamin examined hundreds of cases for his study and notes the hazards of allowing two distinct cases to shape the conversation.

Bob Grant, the former Adams County district attorney who prosecuted the death penalty case that resulted in the state’s last execution, also cautions against drawing broad conclusions based on particular cases.

The outcomes of the two Colorado trials carried characteristics that he could see causing at least one juror to balk at capital punishment.

Grant doesn’t necessarily see that as an indictment of the death penalty. Whether capital punishment stays or goes deserves a broader discussion, he said, like the one the governor promised.

And then, perhaps, a vote.

“If people feel the death penalty has no place in Colorado jurisprudence, so be it,” Grant said. “I suspect they think that there are those cases heinous enough that the defendant deserves to look the devil in the eye and have the case weighed by a jury in terms of the ultimate punishment.”

A lifelong dream

Repeal of the death penalty has been a lifelong dream for state Sen. Lucia Guzman, whose father was a murder victim.

In her mind, the back-to-back Colorado decisions against death in two particularly brutal crimes points to just how confounding the issue can be for juries.

“The death penalty is definitely not any longer a clear-cut decision,” said the Denver Democrat, “even in the midst of absolute certainty that the perpetrators tried and convicted were the actual perpetrators.”

But the Senate minority leader also recognizes she cannot run a repeal bill on her own without Republican support. For that reason, she’s not sure whether she’ll press the issue in the upcoming session — “but there will be a time.”

Rep. Rhonda Fields views capital punishment through a unique lens: Two of the three men currently on Colorado’s death row were involved in the murder of her son.

She sees the recent verdicts differently.

“I have drawn some conclusions,” said the Aurora Democrat. “Our criminal justice system works. … At the end of the day, we have to accept what the jury said. That doesn’t mean the death penalty doesn’t have its place.”

She said she expects someone to introduce repeal legislation in the upcoming session, but she remains uncertain whether she would counter that with a bill of her own, such as to refer the issue to voters.

The political discussion at the Capitol could very well be informed by events unfolding just across the state line.

Raised voices in the death penalty controversy were well within Colorado’s earshot last spring, when neighboring Nebraska’s legislature voted to abolish its little-used punishment — then overrode Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto by the slimmest of margins.

Not only did it become the seventh state since 2007 to repeal the death penalty, but it became the first predominantly Republican state to do so in more than 40 years.

Arguments touching on religious, fiscal and practical concerns gained new-found traction with some conservative Nebraska lawmakers and dovetailed neatly with traditional values.

“We pride ourselves on being a conservative legislature,” said state Sen. Colby Coash, a Republican who represents a district in Lincoln. “We saw that repealing the death penalty is in line with our conservative nature of fiscally responsible government. If any other program in Nebraska were so inefficient and costly, we would’ve gotten rid of that a long time ago.”

Nebraska’s last execution, which was by electrocution, was in 1997, the same year Colorado put convicted killer Gary Davis to death by lethal injection. Since Nebraska moved to lethal injection in 2009, the state has carried out no death sentences amid difficulty in legally obtaining one of the necessary drugs.

A signature drive, largely financed by the governor’s family, appears likely to take the issue to voters in the 2016 election.

“Regardless of the outcome,” Coash said, “I believe Nebraska has executed its last inmate.”

Stacy Anderson, widely credited with galvanizing conservative grassroots support for Nebraska’s repeal, moved to Denver in July and has begun work as outreach coordinator for Colorado’s effort, the Better Priorities Initiative.

She has been invited to speak to some conservative groups in Colorado, where she said the death penalty conversation has been in high gear because of the recently resolved cases. She doesn’t think that structured forums are necessarily the best places for this conversation to happen.

“I think the best types of conversation are ones that happen over cups of coffee. They’re the least emotionally charged and ones where we get the best sense of what’s best for our community,” said Anderson, who describes herself as a Republican convert to the repeal community. “It’s easy for these things to get politicized in super-organized sessions.”

On the national radar

The ongoing conversation about the death penalty in Colorado could touch on one element that raised concerns locally — and has appeared on the national radar.

The decision for a life sentence over death, in both cases, may have revolved around the vote of a single juror.

While the judge in the Aurora theater trial squashed any claims that there was a “plant” on the jury, the potential for one juror to nullify 11 other votes for death has drawn criticism.

But unanimity in pronouncing a death sentence remains the rule in most states. Colorado briefly abandoned that rule in 1995 after prosecutors — who became frustrated by juries declining to impose a death sentence — backed a controversial law that allowed a three-judge panel to sentence a defendant to death instead of a unanimous jury.

The state returned to juries in 2003.

Still, three states do not require jurors to be unanimous in handing down a death sentence. Alabama, Delaware and Florida allow a jury to recommend a death sentence without unanimity, and judges in each of those states have the power to override a jury’s decision.

The law in Alabama allows for a 10-2 majority vote. Florida requires a simple majority when deciding whether aggravating circumstances exist or a defendant should live or die.

The American Bar Association, which does not take a position on the death penalty, released a resolution in February urging all jurisdictions with the death penalty to require unanimity among jurors in finding aggravating factors and in imposing death.

“This deliberative function is crucial in order to ensure that the death sentence is not being unfairly or arbitrarily imposed,” the resolution reads.

While it’s unclear what persuaded any individual jurors to spare the defendants in the Colorado cases, defense attorneys sought to establish mental health issues and child abuse as mitigators.

Are those arguments finding more traction with jurors?

In what would be some of his final comments to the jury, Lewis’ defense attorney Christopher Baumann reminded jurors that months earlier, during jury selection, they each said they could consider a death sentence but also wanted to hear about the defendant’s life.

And so, for a week, jurors heard about the chronic abuse that consumed the defendant’s childhood.

Less than three hours after Baumann sat down, at least one of the jurors found that the facts of the case that suggested mercy outweighed the horrific details that suggested death.

Alan Tuerkheimer, a jury consultant who founded the Chicago-based firm Trial Methods, said as topics such as mental illness and abuse are discussed more frequently and comfortably in the public, those considerations eventually enter deliberation rooms as well.

“Everybody shares more,” Tuerkheimer said. “More people are aware of these things or have been connected to these issues personally.”

Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford who has written extensively on death penalty issues, doesn’t think juries are necessarily better-informed on behavioral science or that defense lawyers have found better ways to make those arguments.

Rather, he ties the willingness to consider those issues to a shift in the way the public generally perceives the death penalty.

“There have always been lots of cases where mental illness is brought in as a mitigator or child abuse, and most of the time it fails,” he said. “I think it’s really more a matter of what’s in the water, what’s in the national consciousness. There’s simply less motivation behind the death penalty, a greater sense of it being kind of a pointless exercise.”

Hickenlooper, citing what he called Colorado’s arbitrary use of the death penalty, said it does not advance justice.

“Each of these killers will die in prison,” he writes in Sunday’s Post. “In the meantime, let’s honor the memories of the victims and continue to support the survivors, their families and loved ones as they heal.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ksimpsondp