Crime & Police

In 2014 U.S. Senior District Judge Richard Matsch ordered the State of Colorado to retry Mark Ellis, convicted of sexual assault on his daughter, or release him within ninety days. Last week — almost thirty months after the judge’s order — a three-judge panel from the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Matsch and denied Ellis any relief.

This week’s episode of Showtime’s Dark Net devotes a segment to how Denver financial adviser Steve Talley’s “life was ruined after facial recognition technology tied him to a crime he didn’t commit.”

Denver Police Department personnel took part in twelve officer-involved shootings last year, the most in at least half a decade. On average, a shooting took place once per month in 2016. Six people were killed in the incidents, but no police officers were injured, and neither have any cops been criminally charged to date.

Paralyzed in a police shooting, Darrell Havens fought the system tenaciously — until he passed away, at age 29, in a Colorado Springs hospital.

The Denver Police Department provided Westword with the final total of arrests and/or citations for the 2017 version of the Denver 4/20 Rally. The numbers are considerably higher than what was initially reported — twenty citations and five arrests — but fewer than in previous years when the festival was held on a weekend and sometimes covered multiple days.

Denver Police Department statistics reveal the ten Denver neighborhoods with the most crimes per square mile during the early months of 2017. But while the numbers are higher than residents would wish, they’ve actually declined over the past two years in many, if not all, of the areas.

All too often these days, we hear about police violence against suspects, as in the 2015 fatal officer-involved shooting of seventeen-year-old Jessie Hernandez, which recently led to a City of Denver settlement of just under $1 million. But there are plenty of times when cops are the victims of violence from individuals they encounter, as is made clear by some startling statistics assembled by the Colorado Springs Police Department. According to FBI data detailed in a series of graphics on view below, more than 1,000 Colorado police officers have been assaulted annually in recent years, with most of those attacks taking place late at night or early in the morning.

Richard Kirk has been sentenced to thirty years in prison for murdering his wife, Kristine Kirk, nearly three years ago, shortly after he’d consumed a marijuana edible. During the hearing at which this punishment was formalized, Kirk implied that the pot candy had spurred the killing, saying, “I had no idea how it would affect me…. I’m so sorry that I became the monster that I was supposed to protect them from.” But a major cannabis business organization maintains that legal marijuana actually reduces crime instead of increasing it.

As many as eight possibly gang-related shootings have taken place near the booming RiNo area over the past two weeks or so according to Mark Ungar, president of the Whittier Neighborhood Association, including a thus-far-unsolved broad daylight gun-down near 31st and Gilpin earlier this month that resulted in serious injuries for two men.

CBS has formally asked a court to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of Burke Ramsey over a 2016 docuseries in which a team of analysts concluded that he’d murdered his sister, JonBenét Ramsey, in their Boulder home on Christmas Day 1996. In response, Ramsey family attorney Lin Wood summarily rejects the arguments made by CBS and Dr. Werner Spitz, a participant in the docuseries being sued separately for comments he made last September during a WWJ-AM/CBS Detroit interview publicizing the program.

An opioid epidemic is sweeping across the country and ravaging Denver’s drug addicts. It’s motivation enough for the Harm Reduction Action Center to push for a safe injection site in Denver, and has staff at the Denver Library, whose Central branch has seen six overdoses this year, training on how…

Rocky Pedersen, who has been charged with 35 criminal counts, including attempted first-degree murder, for a series of robberies at marijuana businesses over the past five months, once owned a medical marijuana dispensary that was itself the target of a high-profile robbery back in 2013.