DENVER -- The Colorado House gave tentative approval Wednesday to a plan to eliminate the death penalty and use the money to focus on cold cases after victims' relatives asked for help finding closure.

The legislation would shift funds currently used to prosecute death-penalty cases to deal with the growing backlog of more than 1,400 unsolved homicides that have stymied local investigators since 1970.

The bill's sponsor, house majority leader Paul Weissmann (D), said the death penalty is a joke in Colorado because only one person has been executed in 40 years.

Weissmann said the money spent on death penalty cases could be better spent elsewhere. He said as an alternative to the death penalty, the state would convict people of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"We take the money we spend right now on the death penalty, and instead of pretending to execute people -- which we don't do, we take that money and appropriate it to a cold case unit to solve some of the 1,435 unsolved homicides in the state," said Weissmann.

Stephanie Cummins agrees with Weissmann. Her brother, Wesley, was gunned down in LoDo in 1993, and his killer has never been punished.

"We as families want our cases solved," said Cummins, whose cousin and stepfather were also murdered.

"To put a needle in someone’s arm and put them to sleep, to me that’s not punishment. I want him to sit in jail for the rest of his life and think of why he’s there. I want him to see my brother’s face every day for the rest of his life," said Cummins.

"There have been 7,000 murders in Colorado in 40 years ... 7,000 murders. We've executed one person," said Weissmann.

Opponents said despite a lack of executions, prosecutors use the death penalty as a bargaining chip, which ultimately saves taxpayers money.

"By having the death penalty hanging over the head of a perpetrator, they have the opportunity to plead down, and save countless thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees," said a lawmaker standing in opposition to the bill. "This is a question so important, and so momentous, that it ought to be referred to the people of Colorado."

Cummins just wants to see more killers off the streets. “If they’ve murdered once and they got away with it, I truly believe they will murder again.”

“We are not going to tell victims of an Oklahoma (City) style bombing, ‘we don’t have the death penalty, so we just gave him a thousand life sentences,’” said another opponent of the bill.

Only two people are currently on death row in Colorado. Nathan Dunlap for the Chuck E. Cheese's murders in 1996. And Sir Mario Owens, recently convicted for killing two witnesses who were going to testify against him in another case.

The last person executed in Colorado was Gary Davis.