By most measures, Colorado isn’t any more liberal than other western states. So how come the state has managed to put to death only one prisoner in the past forty years, while some of its neighbors — Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma — have kept their execution chambers hopping? One reason is…
Technically speaking, Colorado hasn’t had a death row for several years — not since officials at the Colorado State Penitentiary stopped housing the prisoners awaiting execution all in one place and reassigned them to different tiers. The notion became even more elusive after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juries,…
The State of Colorado has managed to execute one murderer in the past forty years. Its death row, current population one, is among the smallest in the country. For four years after a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision threw out the state’s system of having three judges decide whether an…
You can learn a lot about a crook, the Colonel knew, if you discover who his friends are. By his friends you shall know him. But in the case of an honest man like the Colonel, it may be better to consider his enemies. Start with a single desperate moment…
It’s ten minutes to five on the afternoon of June 29, 2006, and Mark Brennan can feel the tension coiled inside him like a steel spring, wound to the breaking point. He sits in a nearly deserted courtroom in Denver’s Alfred A. Arraj United States Courthouse with his client, Bill…
History Lesson #1 In 1829, William Bent headed west to join his older brother in the fur business. William was twenty years old, the son of a Missouri supreme court justice — and, like his brother Charlie, who would one day be the first governor of the New Mexico Territory,…
After twenty years of highly decorated service in the U.S. Army Special Forces, David Boone thought he knew the rules of engagement. But that was before he found himself back in the shit — Baghdad’s Green Zone, to be precise — and working for the private sector. In the emerging…
I’m going to show you a bunch of maps,” David Theobald tells the undergraduates packed into the small lecture hall. “Don’t get caught up writing down the numbers. I want you to get a couple of key points.” As a rule, maps and the numbers behind them are a matter…
When the goon squad showed up at his place at five in the morning, Tommy Silverstein knew something was up. He wasn’t accustomed to greeting guests at such an ungodly hour — much less a team of corrections officers, helmeted and suited up for action. In fact, Silverstein wasn’t used…
A hundred miles southwest of Denver, the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum houses a killer lineup of mobsters (Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano), gang leaders (Barry “The Baron” Mills), assassins (Colombian hit man Dandenis “La Quica” Muñoz Mosquera) and terrorists (John “American Taliban” Walker Lindh). But not to worry — despite…
From his Lakewood offices along the Sixth Avenue freeway frontage road, attorney David Mintz can see the towering 1-800-4INJURY sign in his parking lot and the blur of commuter traffic beyond. It’s a handy juxtaposition. Road warriors who get rear-ended on the freeway can whip out their cell phones, call…
It takes all kinds, this argument over guns in America. Patriots and paranoids, cranks and constitutionalists, handwringers and Huns, they all step up to the plate sooner or later. The debate is rarely polite, often incoherent and generally clouded by suspicion, fear and rancor. But it takes something special to…
After it was all over — the emergency meetings and votes of no confidence, the suspensions and resignations, the backroom intrigues and public squabbles, culminating in the ouster of the fire chief — Charlie Neppell decided it was time to give credit where credit was due. So when the board…
A decade ago, wrestling with crushing legal and financial problems and looking at months of jail time, a cocky 26-year-old stockbroker named Douglas Alan Glaser decided to disappear. He walked away from his business and home in Colorado, only to reappear in New Jersey as a man named Douglas Michael…
The trucks rumble through the gates of Waste Management Recycle America’s plant in north Denver, lining up for their turn at the scales. A driver for the City of Thornton tailgates one from the City of Denver. Dump trucks from commercial and residential collection routes across the metro area squeeze…
Earlier this year, officials at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center quietly settled a long-running lawsuit filed by Robert Schrier, one of their most distinguished professors of medicine. Forged two weeks before the suit was scheduled to go to trial, the deal required CU to fork over more than…
The justice system isn’t very good at confessing its own crimes. Even when officials admit that mistakes were made, they rarely take the kind of action that might actually correct them. In the case of Krystal Voss, a 32-year-old mother convicted of child abuse in the death of her nineteen-month-old…
A cynic might regard the phone call that District Attorney Carol Chambers made to Jonathan Steiner, for which she was publicly censured six weeks ago, as a clumsy attempt to intimidate a lawyer who was hassling the DA’s political ally. Chambers has a different interpretation — but even that version…
As the moment of his sentencing approaches, Tristan Gilmour sits petulantly in an Arapahoe County courtroom. His put-upon attorney, deputy public defender Justin Bogan, wants him to read a pre-sentencing report, but Gilmour is having none of it. Cuffed and clad in jailhouse orange, Gilmour is a baby-faced 21-year-old with…
After Eric Harris shot him and left him for dead on the lawn of Columbine High School, all sixteen-year-old Mark Taylor could think about was seeing his family one more time before the life ebbed out of him. Fighting to stay conscious, he prayed, he babbled — and, with the…
In Colorado, 2006 will be remembered as the Year of the Great Pretender. Many of the most notorious newsmakers were people masquerading as someone or something they weren’t — leading secret lives, conning the public, boasting of a competency they didn’t possess or taking credit for achievements and even crimes…
Okay, we could have done better. We admit that. We lied about our age. We faked our memoirs. We called ourselves Art or Daxis and told the escort we were from Kansas City. We stole other people’s identities, maxed out the credit cards and blamed the illegals. And yes, we…
