Packer was spared the death penalty when his lawyers discovered that the murder statutes on the books for 1874 had been repealed and replaced with a "savings clause", which spared him being tried for murder on a technicality. In October 1885, the sentence was reversed by the Colorado Supreme Court being based on an "ex post facto" law. They had declared that the government could not sentence a man to death for committing a crime, if it had indeed occurred, before Colorado officially became a state as opposed to a territory.