Which state's philosophy on death penalty is best?

After 21 years of living in Utah, describing myself as a Colorado native hardly seems legitimate. To cope with the ongoing tug between these two places, I've become a student of the politics and history of each state.

At the risk of oversimplification, Utah has remained a very red place in my two decades as a "Utahn" while my home state of Colorado has trended increasingly blue. For example, the Colorado Senate debated a bill Monday whether to abolish the death penalty after the bill narrowly passed the House. As proposed, the legislation would take the $1 million spent each year to prosecute death penalty cases and use it to investigate cold cases instead. The bill, as written, failed.

Earlier this year, the Utah Legislature considered a constitutional revision that would have strictly limited felony appeals, including capital cases. The bill was killed in the House.

Recently, many state legislatures have debated the death penalty. Some lawmakers want to do away with it for economic reasons — the costs of prosecuting and defending these cases has become too great for the states to bear, particularly under current economic conditions.

But some of these debates are philosophical in nature. Colorado has executed only one person in 42 years. Legal scholars and policymakers alike are questioning, given the state's experience with capital punishment, whether the death penalty deters crime. There are two men on death row in Colorado and their death sentences would not be affected if the death penalty ban were implemented.

There are 10 condemned men on Utah's death row, although the state has not conducted an execution since 1999. By limiting appeals, the Attorney General's Office wants to shave years off death penalty litigation. The goal is to shorten the time between imposing a sentence and carrying out an execution, which some believe would bolster the state's ultimate punishment.

Isn't seeking a constitutional amendment to achieve this end another way of saying the death penalty isn't working in Utah, either? If appeals grind on in state and federal courts for more than two decades, aren't these inmates effectively serving de facto life-without-parole sentences?

So we're clear here, no one is talking about doing away with the death penalty in Utah. Frankly, it's difficult to imagine the conservative Utah Legislature entertaining such a debate.

I'm troubled, though, by the disparity between the numbers of people on Utah's death row when compared to that of Colorado, a state of nearly 5 million people.