Figuring some modest improvement is better than none, the Colorado House Judiciary Committee passed along a bill yesterday that’s intended to make child and family investigators (CFI) and other professionals operating in family court more accountable — after first amending and watering down its most significant measures, which had been…
Real-estate investor Aaron Million’s modest proposal to build a 550-mile pipeline to move water from southwest Wyoming to Colorado’s Front Range has lots of critics. But a major challenge facing opponents is how to get city types to understand what’s at stake, including the spectacular scenery and recreation of the…
The most shameful date in the history of Colorado’s death penalty is January 6, 1939 — the day the state executed a bewildered 23-year-old man with an IQ of 46, a man who was innocent in just about every sense of the word His name was Joe Arridy. And three-quarters…
Nearly twenty years after Denver’s much-hyped “Summer of Violence” triggered a harsher approach to juvenile offenders statewide, lawmakers are wrestling with two reform bills — and a new report contends that Colorado’s system for moving juvenile cases into adult court isn’t working and doesn’t provide adequate protection for teen defendants…
A broad proposal by the country’s largest private prison company to buy up and privatize state prisons has been met with a stiff rebuke from the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of justice policy and religious groups, who are urging all fifty state governors to reject the company’s…
The appointment of Callie Hendrickson to a board that helps shape the federal government’s wild horse management plan has touched off a frenzy of petitions and protests by horse advocacy groups. They say the Grand Junction woman is a defender of ranching interests who’s endorsed commercial slaughter of “excess horses”…
There’s no coherent explanation yet for seventeen-year-old T.J. Lane’s attack on Chardon High School in Ohio on Monday, which killed three students and injured two others — and the “why” may prove elusive for some time to come. The shootings have been treated as utterly random, although recent reports suggest…
Call it a high honor. In recent months, a painstakingly crafted kids’ treehouse along the Roaring Fork River has become a local landmark of sorts for commuters making the Glenwood Springs-to-Aspen schlep. Now the 230-square-foot structure has found fame beyond the Western Slope, featured among other big little housing ideas…
Somewhere Byron “Whizzer” White is smiling. The late, great University of Colorado football star and U.S. Supreme Court Justice never cared much for his colleagues’ bleeding-heart Miranda decision back in 1966, which required that suspects in custody must be advised of their rights before being interrogated. And this week, the…
It was almost three years ago that I first got interested in the case of Tara Perry, subject of this week’s feature, “The Girl Who Fell to Earth.” Perry was among several inmates considered strong candidates for clemency — all of whom were serving disproportionately long sentences and appeared to…
Tara Perry, the subject of this week’s cover story, “The Girl Who Fell to Earth,” has made a remarkable turnaround since she was first incarcerated thirteen years ago, at the age of sixteen. Corrections staff, teachers and others view her as a model of rehabilitation, one who’s tried to transform…
Despite concerns raised by the EPA and alarms sounded in a state report, Colorado officials are moving forward with a plan to divert more water from the Upper Colorado River to the Front Range — which is why anglers, rafters, tourism interests and others will be rallying in protest on…
They know how to make an entrance, these bad boys. They strut into the King Soopers on Smoky Hill Road on a Friday evening in May like it’s fight night in Vegas and they’ve got ringside seats, their every move radiating heat and menace. There are four of them, all…
In these lean times, last week Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar proposed slashing costs and hiking a range of user fees — everything from the cost of a federal stamp for duck hunting to oil and gas drilling permits — to make ends meet at his agency. But one…
A former prisoner, now a shareholder in the country’s largest for-profit prison operator, has won a battle with company management over his campaign to hold the Corrections Corporation of America accountable for reducing sexual abuse at its facilities. The Securities and Exchange Commission has ruled that the shareholder resolution, calling…
This arrives a little late for Valentine’s Day, but Louie Lucero has an unusual approach to romance that’s bound to send any female into orbit — and probably to the hospital. The southwest Colorado man, who has a history of domestic violence cases and is currently on trial for assault…
Legendary illustrator John Powers Severin, whose 60-year career in the comics world stretched from the dawning of MAD magazine to the Silver Age at Marvel to a gay revival of the Rawhide Kid and beyond, died over the weekend at his southeast Denver home. He was 90 years old. “Truly…
A high-ranking official at one of the nation’s largest private prison operators has been accused by his daughter-in-law of intimidation and harassment in a Boulder domestic dispute — including threatening to initiate a federal inquiry into her legal status by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — according to court documents…
It’s official: 2011 was a record-busting year in the oil industry, with the five largest companies — BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell — reporting all-time-high profits of $137 billion. That’s a 75 percent jump from the year before, even though the giants produced less oil than in…
For decades researchers have attempted to fathom how the “criminal mind” differs from that of the average citizen. Now it appears there’s often one critical physiological difference — a significant percentage of convicted felons may be suffering from impaired thinking because of banged-up brains…
Despite the obligatory squawks from lawmakers about the need for transparency in government, few of their actions are quite as transparent as their efforts to shield internal bureaucratic processes from outside scrutiny. For a demonstration of this principle in action, look no further than two bills currently creeping through the…
A running gag in the classic comedy Raising Arizona is that just about everybody in the vicinity of Tempe is packing heat — even the pimple-faced kid at the convenience store, who whips out a Dirty Harry special and starts blasting away at stickup man Nicholas Cage. But it’s no…
