So the boys in Vegas now have Your Denver Broncos as 3-1 favorites to win Super Bowl XLVII, ahead of annoying New England (7-2), the hot-hot Seahawks (6-1), and the snowball-chance-in-hell Vikings (100-1). Win ten games in a row, and even the smart money starts to take you seriously. But…
Uneasy hangs the cowboy-hatted head of the man in charge of one-fifth of the land mass in the United States. The strain of running the Department of the Interior seems to be catching up with Ken Salazar, who offered to “punch out” a reporter last month in response to a…
When he was seventeen years old, people told Gary DeWayne Harris they didn’t expect to see him reach twenty-one. He was running with the wrong crowd, selling drugs, headed for trouble. Harris figured he had the street smarts to make a go of it, but his choices cut short his…
When we last caught up with John Baker, irascible author/songwriter/culinary guerrilla, he was celebrating the richness in spirit of the downtrodden by performing his song “The Homeless Bums of Aspen” on YouTube. Baker knows a thing or two about being without portfolio in Colorado’s glitziest town, but since those days…
The first, fragmentary accounts of a shooter’s rampage through an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, were just starting to make headlines last week when the cyberchatter about a conspiracy began. This is not just some lone nutcase engaged in senseless killing for his own indecipherable reasons, the mutterers assured each…
When Colorado native son Ken Salazar became Barack Obama’s Secretary of the Interior four years ago, it was widely expected that he would steer a more “balanced” course through the energy wars across the West, pulling back on the drill-baby-drill mantra of the Bush years. It hasn’t worked out that…
Despite a personal appeal from hizzoner himself, the Denver Parks and Recreation Advisory Board gave a thumbs-down last night to a controversial plan by Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration to swap a parcel of open space in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building. Amid much soul-searching and head-scratching by…
Five years ago, Denver park officials thought highly enough of a little-known parcel of open space along the Cherry Creek corridor, containing some of the last traces of native prairie vegetation to be found in the city, to officially designate it as a natural area. But now, Mayor Michael Hancock’s…
Prolonged drought and a rising population have put the squeeze on Western Slope water supplies. But Colorado River activists have something to celebrate in their long battle with Front Range development interests — a hard-won agreement that will help limit the impact of the Windy Gap Firming Project, a further…
Frustrated by a decade of legal delays and setbacks, the father of slain state corrections officer Eric Autobee says that he now opposes further efforts to obtain the death penalty for inmate Edward Montour Jr. for the 2002 murder. In a recent interview, Bob Autobee also blasted the leadership of…
Denver writer and part-time cab driver Gary Reilly was more interested in writing novels — many of which had to do with a cabbie named Murph who also wrote novels — than publishing them. But since Reilly’s death last year from cancer at 61, his Murph sagas are rolling out…
Erik Jensen was seventeen when he got mixed up in the deadly domestic drama of Nate Ybanez, his best buddy. Ybanez is now serving a life sentence for the 1998 murder of his mother, Julie; Jensen is also serving life without parole for helping him — although whether he was…
This week’s feature, “The Old Boys,” explores an emerging quandary in the criminal justice arena. Colorado has 51 state inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were under eighteen — and thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision declaring such sentences unconstitutional, this special population may have…
The day his old life ended, Jeff Johnson was jonesing for a cigarette. He was tall and gangly, a bit of a rebel and a goof. He liked to shoot pool and flirt with the girls at Scores, a teen dive in Aurora, and a coffin nail dangling from his…
Jailhouse confessions tend to be treated skeptically by judges and juries, and with good reason; inmates have a bad habit of lying about their crimes, either to brag or to blame someone else. But the confession that inmate Jeff Johnson says he obtained from co-defendant Johnathan Jordan, stating that Jordan…
Steven Unruh is having a hard time convincing anyone that he spent hours talking to Aurora theater shootings suspect James Holmes shortly after his arrest last July. Jail officials say there’s no way that Unruh could have had that kind of access. Yet certain elements of the story — which…
Nobody has ever mistaken Ken Salazar, the mild-mannered, 57-year-old Secretary of the Interior, for Mike Tyson. Except, perhaps, Salazar himself. Taken by surprise by a question about one of his agency’s most troubled programs — the scandal-plagued effort to rid the public lands of “excess” wild horses — the flustered…
Update, November 8, 3:55 p.m.: I just connected by phone with George Brauchler, the winner in the much-scrutinized race for district attorney in the 18th Judicial District, discussed in detail below. He mused that, aside from the Craig Silverman-Bill Ritter slugfest for Denver DA in the 1990s, this may have…
Eric Swanson’s troubled past caught up with him last week in an Arapahoe County courtroom — although not with quite the vengeance prosecutors had in mind. At one point facing habitual criminal charges and a potential 64-year-sentence for a case that began as a municipal summons for harassment, Swanson received…
Thomas Eric Espinoza, who beat a female neighbor to death and then attempted to mount an insanity defense, has had his conviction upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals. The case had posed numerous legal challenges, largely because of Espinoza’s insistence on representing himself at trial while pleading insanity…
By the time he turned 36, Damien Echols had spent half his life on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. How he managed to sustain hope and sanity in the bowels of a supermax prison is just part of the story found in Life After Death (Blue Rider…
Is there life after death? After eighteen years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, most of them spent in the debilitating confines of death row, Damien Echols plans to find out. In 1993 Echols, then eighteen, and two other Arkansas teenagers were arrested and charged with the murders…
