Law enforcement officers in Wyoming say President Donald Trump’s promise to make the death penalty mandatory for people who kill police and first responders is appreciated and overdue.
“The only good cop killer is a dead one — after a fair trial, of course,” said Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak.
Trump signed an executive order Jan. 20, his first day in office, that makes the death penalty mandatory for killing law enforcement officers. He then doubled down on the promise during his speech to the joint Congress and American people this week.
“We’re also once again giving our police officers the support, protection and respect they so dearly deserve,” Trump said Tuesday. “They have to get it. They have such a hard, dangerous job, but we’re going to make it less dangerous.
“The problem is the bad guys don’t respect the law.”
Kozak agrees, saying that sentencing cop killers to death is only half of the battle in providing an effective deterrence. The other half is following through.
“You lose effectiveness if you have to wait years and years” for a sentence to be carried out, he said. “And it’s (unfair) for the families, too. For it to be effective, it has to be swift.”
Kozak said the message first responders took from Trump’s speech was that someone has their back during a time when there’s a lot of shade thrown at local law enforcement agencies and officers.
“The employees (at Kozak’s office) were refreshed to hear the support from the President of the United States,” he said. “It was the talk of the town, at least here in the sheriff’s office.”
Not Unanimous
The executive order came almost a year removed from the death of Sheridan Police Sgt. Nevada Krinkee, who was shot and killed in the line of duty Feb. 13, 2024.
Krinkee was the first Wyoming law enforcement agent to die by homicide in the line of duty since 1997.
The man accused of killing Krinkee was himself killed trying to make an escape after a two-day standoff with police.
Not all support Trump’s executive order, including state Rep. Ken Pendergraft, a Sheridan Republican.
When asked about the order Thursday, he told Cowboy State Daily that while he supports appropriate punishment for murdering someone, he doesn’t think mandating the death penalty for some crimes and not others is the answer.
Punishments should be equal across the board, he said.
“It’s an egregious thing to shoot anybody, an egregious thing,” he said, adding that, “Murder is murder.”
Attempts to connect with Sheridan Police Chief Travis Koltiska were unsuccessful by the time this story was published.
You Have To Mean It
Like Kozak, retired law enforcement officer Frank Groth of Gillette said he supports a mandatory death penalty for killing first responders.
Taking the life of a police officer “is next level,” said Groth, who was a police officer for more than 20 years.
“If you look at it realistically, I’ve always maintained any use of lethal force is a tragedy for all involved,” he said. “In the case of Sergeant Krinkee, that was pretty darned egregious. He was there serving an eviction notice, a trespass, to a squatter.
“For that to happen the way that it happened, that’s really, to me, above and beyond. When you look at it as — that’s just crazy, that’s just really hard to rationalize.”
Groth also echoed Kozak that a death sentence doesn’t mean much if those who get it end up delaying their punishment for decades.
“As to the death penalty, I’m of a very mixed opinion on that,” he said. “It works very well when it’s administered. There are 700-and-something people sitting on death sentences in California now. They’re never going to see those sentences administered.”
Sentencing cop killers to death, then not seeing that carried out, is also cruel and an injustice to their families, Groth said. That’s why he would like to see the executive order or any laws that could come from it to go further and put time limits on them.
“The perceived lack of justice, you cannot discount that,” he said. “Many times, they’re probably going to feel like they’ve been cheated. You have to do something and you have to mean it.
“You can impose sentences all day long, but in some states, life in prison is 10 years. That’s kind of crazy, too. You have to mean it for any sentence in a criminal matter to be justice. There has to be some teeth to it.”
Knowing that killing an officer means mandatory death could provide the moment of hesitation for someone to not pull a trigger on a cop, Kozak said.
“What we’re hoping is there’s a split second there that someone decides not to kill a cop because they know it means a death sentence for sure,” he said.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
