One reason Colorado has fewer people on death row is that fewer people receive death sentences, and a handful of death row inmates have had their sentences overturned. They were resentenced to life in prison. Since 1970, lawyers from the Colorado Defenders Office have three times persuaded the Colorado Supreme Court to invalidate various versions of the state's death penalty statute.

What does this say about Utah? Have more people been sentenced to death because our crimes are more heinous? Or do we Utahns subscribe to the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" sort of justice? Or, are the men and women who defend suspects charged with capital offenses unable to wage the same level of defense as an independent state-funded public defender office?

I don't have the answers to these questions.

But they're questions that have nagged me for nearly 20 years. In the summer of 1989, I covered condemned Hi Fi killer William Andrews' clemency hearing. His trial attorney, John Caine, had worked as a public defender less than a year when he was assigned the case in 1974. Wolfgang Gossett, the former investigator of the Weber County Public Defender's Association, testified to the Utah State Board of Pardons that he had failed to provide a "thorough and adequate investigation" to Andrews.

"This man (Andrews) never killed anyone. He never raped anyone," Gossett said. Yet Andrews received the same penalty as co-defendant Pierre Dale Selby for his participation in the crime.

I don't intend to retry the case on these pages. The parole board did not commute Andrews' sentence. He was executed in 1992 after his appeals were exhausted.

But there are things about his case that trouble me to this day. Mostly, though, it taught me a great deal about why we must provide the greatest degree of justice to those who face the ultimate penalty. There's no do-over on the death penalty.

Marjorie Cortez, who wonders if the death penalty will eventually be banned in all states during her lifetime, is a Deseret News editorial writer. E-mail her at Marjorie@desnews.com.