The U.S. Justice Department has decided to join in a federal lawsuit filed by two Colorado whistleblowers; it alleges that a national palliative care provider improperly billed Medicare millions of dollars for hospice services provided to patients who weren’t terminally ill. The suit against Optum Palliative and Hospice Care claims…
Even his supporters admit that Ethan Abbott, the embattled natural farming activist who’s been feuding with county authorities on several fronts, has a bit of a temper. But Abbott, 38, who was sentenced yesterday to ninety days in jail and eighteen months of probation in Weld County Court over a…
Growing up in northwest Denver, Diann Kissell carried a terrible secret inside for more than half of her first thirteen years. Her father, an insurance salesman and the patriarch of a proud Latino family, had singled her out among his ten children for furtive and persistent sexual abuse. His demands…
This week’s cover story traces the dramatic shift in direction of the Colorado Department of Corrections since the 2013 murder of its chief, Tom Clements, by Evan Ebel, a violent parolee who’d just spent six years in solitary confinement. The death of the reform-minded Clements had a profound impact on…
When Tom Clements accepted the job of executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections three years ago, he knew he was taking on an enormous challenge. Two particularly alarming sets of figures, trends that he believed to be more than casually related, caught his eye immediately. One had to…
The recent murder of an inmate at the Sterling Correctional Facility — the sixth homicide at the state’s largest prison since 2010 — has prompted Colorado Department of Corrections executive director Rick Raemisch to promise an “intensive” investigation into the circumstances of the death. The killing comes in the wake…
There’s plenty of back-patting going on today in the smoke-free back rooms where politics thrives like spores in agar, after an eleventh-hour deal was forged by Governor John Hickenlooper, Representative Jared Polis and others to remove four initiatives dealing with oil and gas development from the November ballot. The move…
Update below: The Colorado Court of Appeals has overruled a Denver judge’s decision to allow Open Door Ministries to operate a treatment program for recovering addicts in an historic mansion on Clarkson Street — the latest twist in a long-running zoning battle in the neighborhood that was the subject of…
A single injection well in Weld County, used to dispose of millions of gallons of produced water from fracking operations, has been linked to 500 minor earthquakes in the area over a seven-week period since early June, according to University of Colorado researchers who’ve been monitoring seismic activity around the…
At its national convention in Denver this week, officials of the American Veterinary Medical Association have taken the unusual step of “clarifying” the organization’s policy on cat declawing to stress that it’s a major surgery — making prominent use of the word “amputation” in describing the procedure for the first…
Backers of a proposed “healthy living park” in Alamosa, who saw their efforts last year to acquire former school property in a prime location frustrated by a controversial deal that put the property in the hands of an RV park developer for substantially less than its appraised value, have settled…
Court records and testimony prompted by a wave of inmate homicides at the Sterling Correctional Facility claim that SCF officers have repeatedly placed at-risk prisoners, particularly sex offenders, in life-threatening situations — and that some staff have even celled deadly enemies together to “teach a lesson,” fully expecting one inmate…
Does the father of a victim in one death-penalty case have the right to contact family members in another capital case? And, under Colorado law, do prosecutors have any obligation to facilitate that conversation — even if the discussion isn’t going to help their cause? The questions are key to…
A prominent Boulder couple, former close friends of John and Patsy Ramsey, have filed a lawsuit seeking the full release of long-suppressed documents drafted by a grand jury investigating the 1996 murder of the Ramseys’ six-year-old daughter, JonBenet. Last fall a judge released four redacted pages from eighteen pages of…
At the Denver premiere of the film Dear Governor Hickenlooper last month, there were no stretch limos, no red-carpet divas, no paparazzi or moguls in tuxedos. What you got instead, squeezed into the spartan confines of the Oriental Theater, were auteurs in old jeans and ball caps, a modest concession…
This week’s cover story, “Frack Attack!,” explores the increasingly ambitious anti-fracking movement in Colorado, a state with plenty of oil and gas wells and plenty of people who want to shut ’em down. One sign of the movement’s increasing sophistication is the production of a contentious new documentary, Dear Governor…
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has affirmed that developer-turned-gadfly Mike Zinna is entitled to substantial legal fees in his long-running feud with Jefferson County officials — who, he claimed, tried to intimidate him, put him under surveillance and violated his constitutional right…
Our June 12 cover story, “The Fatal Moment,” reviews the shifting evidence and contradictory witness accounts that sent three Denver men to prison for life after a fatal 1992 drive-by shooting. Following 22 years of good behavior, Eric Lightner and brothers William and Brian Lee hope to eventually see their…
We’ve written before about the strange career of Denver cabbie and secret author Gary Reilly, who wrote more than two dozen novels over decades but never tried to publish any of them before his death from cancer in 2011, at the age of 61. That long silence is now being…
It has been a long time now. Twenty-two years this week. Long enough for the whole episode to be forgotten by the cops, the lawyers and just about everybody else. But to three graying convicts and their families, it’s still unfinished business, a problem that has to be solved. Eric…
A new study of the Stapleton neighborhood, Denver’s nationally acclaimed infill project, concludes that key traffic engineering decisions have encouraged high-speed driving rather than traffic “calming,” made residential areas less safe and generally worked against efforts to develop the area as a showcase of New Urbanism — a design ethos…
Two years ago, former Arapahoe County sheriff Pat Sullivan managed to chisel down a pack of squalid allegations involving methamphetamine, trading drugs for sex, exploiting a mentally challenged individual and even a sort-of admission of sex with minors into the world’s sweetest plea deal, copping to one felony and one…
