Six years ago, Janny Barizonte, a 24-year-old law student, headed with friends to Club Vinyl looking for fun. What she got instead changed her life, and not for the better: a painful altercation with club security personnel, followed by an arrest, a violent assault by a sheriff’s deputy, a criminal…
In an unusual court hearing unfolding in Castle Rock, attorneys for Edward Montour Jr. are seeking to withdraw his guilty plea for the murder of a correctional officer in 2002, claiming that he was mentally ill at the time and seeking “court-assisted suicide” by firing his lawyers in a death-penalty…
Last summer Denver District Judge Ann B. Frick ruled that city zoning officials blundered in issuing a rooming-house permit to Open Door Ministries, which was seeking to launch a group home for recovering alcoholics and addicts in a historic block of Capitol Hill. But Frick has now reversed her order…
In what’s being hailed as a major victory for community groups fighting fracking projects, a Denver federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management can no longer keep secret the identity of companies seeking to obtain oil and gas leases on public lands. The landmark ruling reverses…
As the Pentagon contemplates different ways to achieve reductions in force in the ramp-down from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, business leaders in Colorado Springs are pushing for a plan that would actually bring more troops to Fort Carson — while ranchers battling expansion of a maneuver site in southeastern…
Most physicians go through their entire careers without ever running afoul of state regulators. But two years after a 26-year-old inmate with chronic kidney problems died while under his care, prison doctor David M. Oba has received a sharply worded letter of admonition from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies…
The director of Colorado’s Bureau of Land Management office seems to be engaged in an elaborate game of chicken over the past few months. On several occasions, Helen Hankins has announced plans to auction off oil and gas leases in environmentally sensitive areas, including tracts near Mesa Verde National Park…
Here at the Wild-Urban Interface Desk, we’re puzzling over the new logo just unveiled by Rocky Mountain National Park in celebration of its centennial, chosen two years early from close to a hundred entries. As you can see, it’s a highly retro design, strong on pine cones and columbines and…
The Bureau of Land Management’s decision late last week to seek additional environmental study of possible impacts of oil and gas exploration on the Roan Plateau has left energy interests fuming and sulking over the continued delays in tapping the area’s rich gas reserves — and enviro activists crunching numbers…
When you’re battling an institution as powerful as Denver Water, it’s best to have the will of the people, or at least a lot of average joes, on your side. Environmental groups trying to protect the Upper Colorado River basin from massive diversion projects that benefit Front Range development seem…
A detailed study of Colorado’s juvenile courts by a national coalition of attorneys who specialize in juvenile defense work describes the state system as plagued by turnover, case overload, confusion and judicial shortcuts that sometimes deprive the juveniles in its care of their rights — and is more likely to…
The hydraulic fracturing process involves pumping chemicals into the ground to free oil and gas reserves trapped in tight shale formations. The debate over fracking’s environmental risks isn’t all that different; it’s become a battle to squeeze a few facts out of stubbornly entrenched forces, amid a lot of high-pressure…
The list of books discussed in the Words Beyond Bars Project, a pilot program at the Limon Correctional Facility: Cooked, by Jeff Henderson (2007). The true story of a cocaine dealer’s transformation into a top chef in Las Vegas, after nine years of learning kitchen lore at a federal prison…
The prisoners report to the officer at the desk, then head into a room awash in sunlight in the visitation area of the Limon Correctional Facility. They murmur soft greetings to each other, squint into the brightness streaming through the windows, quickly choose their seats. For men without prospects, they…
This week’s cover story, “The Lifers Book Club,” reports on the Words Beyond Bars Project, a pilot progam at the Limon Correctional Facility that puts high-security prisoners, many of them serving life sentences, in a room with volunteers to discuss great books. It’s a modest effort that could transform lives…
When Denver craftsman Corbin Clay launched his own custom furniture company a few years back, he saw an opportunity to make stylish, affordable pieces out of an abundant resource: the vast stands of dead lodgepole pines left by Colorado’s raging beetle epidemic. It was a shrewd move; among thousands of…
His doctors have told Darrell Havens that surgery could help relieve his deteriorating condition, but the wheelchair-bound inmate’s keepers in the Colorado Department of Corrections aren’t exactly eager to okay the operation — or to release him to seek care on his own. Havens, who was left a quadriplegic by…
Like pine beetles, Boulder artist Jill Powers does some of her best work in bark. Her mixed media fiber sculptures and installations draw on exotic natural materials, from seed pods to a tough inner bark called Kozo that happens to be “sustainably grown” — and that’s good news, since Powers’s…
Despite an emphatic recommendation against the move by her advisory board, Denver Parks and Recreation manager Lauri Dannemiller has okayed Mayor Michael Hancock’s plan to swap open space in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building downtown. The decision sets up a showdown between the administration and some Hampden…
Take me up into your mind once or twice before I die (you know why: because the eyes of you and me will be full of dirt some day). — e.e. cummings She was always jotting down notable quotes in that journal of hers, the one her mother gave her…
It’s now official: In some areas of Colorado, 2012 was the driest year since 2000. A late dump of snow in December has failed to take portions of the Western Slope and the southern part of the state out of the “extreme drought” category. And if the weather doesn’t take…
While the clock ticks away on last-minute negotiations to avoid plunging the nation’s economy over the dreaded fiscal cliff, the U.S. Senate did take steps late last night to provide a path up the side of a mountain — and in the process transform thousands of Colorado scofflaws into legal…
