Vanessa Collier, a 33 year-old mother of two and wife to her partner, Christina, passed away on December 30th. Her funeral at New Hope Ministries was to feature photos of Vanessa proposing to Christina, and family pictures with their daughters, Madison and Kylie. Fifteen minutes after the service was supposed…
With less than a week until Martin Luther King Jr. Day, activists, arts organizations and politicians are all gearing up for a series of events to mark the holiday, which will be followed by continuing discussions of racism. (Mayor Hancock’s office promises that the schedule for those discussions will be…
The First Unitarian Society of Denver Church, on the corner of 14th and Lafayette streets, has been home to Arturo Hernandez Garcia since October 21, 2014, when he officially sought sanctuary. He is fighting to stay in the United States under President Barack Obama’s deferred action program. But in the…
After ten years in the House of Representatives and six as a U.S. Senator, Mark Udall would prefer to go out known as a champion of individual liberty and the environment, rather than the faltering “Senator Uterus” who one-noted his re-election campaign and badly underestimated the Republican who unseated him,…
An administrative law judge has ruled that both Colorado Campaign for Life and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners must pay fines for failing to disclosing financial information in their campaigns against two Republican candidates in the state senate primaries last year. The groups must also file disclosures of spending and earmarked…
Many people are asking what the recent renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba will mean for travel and trade between the island and the United States. For Ryan Sethre and his wife Kim, a Colorado couple, the new deal meant a more exciting trip than they anticipated. Ryan is the coordinator…
This could get ugly. Hot on the heels of huge City of Denver payouts in cases involving Jamal Hunter and Marvin Booker, Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher blasted the Denver Sheriff’s Department for a lack of transparency regarding his office’s efforts to audit jail operations overseen by the DSD. A key…
This week’s Westword cover story, “The Snitch Who Stole Christmas,” examines the aftermath of a 2013 police investigation that led to the arrests of forty people in Trinidad for allegedly selling heroin, meth, and other drugs to two undercover informants. The cases were so riddled with legal and procedural problems…
UPDATE: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Trinidad police, alleging that two detectives fabricated and misrepresented evidence in the 40-person drug sting carried out in 2013. The organization brought the suit on behalf of two former suspects, probation officer Danika Gonzales and school employee Felicia Valdez,…
In June, Eleanor Dewey learned about the murder of Zoraida Reyes. For many, Reyes was a statistic, just another name on a growing list of transgender women killed in the United States — at least eleven in 2014. But Dewey remembers Reyes as a friend, a fierce immigrant-rights organizer who…
Colorado doesn’t have a death-with-dignity law intended to allow the terminally ill to end their lives. However, a bill on that topic will reportedly be pushed during the upcoming legislative session, inspired by the plight of Charles Selsberg, who lobbied for such a change in “Please, I Want to Die,”…
In the year following the 2013 murder of state prison chief Tom Clements by a parole absconder, parole officers working for the Colorado Department of Corrections put in for an unprecedented 8,858 hours of overtime pay — and nearly a third of that overtime was logged by one small, elite…
Republicans’ domination in the recent midterm — John Hickenlooper’s squeaker of a reelection win was among the few Democratic bright spots — extended to the Colorado State Senate, which will now be under GOP control owing to a vote count not formally announced until days after the election. And while…
After news organizations declared John Hickenlooper victorious in an ultra-tight gubernatorial race with challenger Bob Beauprez, the once-and-future guv finally staged a victory rally at the State Capitol yesterday morning. But what he said has prompted less conversation than what his chief of staff, Roxanne White, did. “Was John Hickenlooper’s…
In addition to statewide contests (including a squeaker of a governor’s race), Election Day 2014 saw plenty of local initiatives on ballots, with one of the most interesting being Aurora’s Proposition 2D, which would have repealed the city’s longstanding prohibition on pit bulls. In the end, the measure lost handily,…
While most of the attention in regard to yesterday’s election has gone to Cory Gardner’s shellacking of Mark Udall and a governor’s race not called in John Hickenlooper’s favor until this morning, the outcomes for other measures on the ballot have been equally fascinating. Take the so-called personhood measure, which…
Update: Moments ago, 9News formally declared that Governor John Hickenlooper has been reelected. Some votes still are yet to be counted, but the station, as well as the Denver Post, has determined that challenger Bob Beauprez will fall short of victory. Continue for our previous coverage of election day 2014…
Mary DeForest believes in George Orwell’s theory that language rooted in Latin and Greek muddies communication and often covers up political agendas. And so she invented the Latinometer, a bullshit detector that analyzes text and determines how many words are rooted in Latin, German, French and Greek, then ranks the…
Election day is tomorrow, and if there’s anything Republican and Democratic activists can agree upon, it’s the importance of voter turnout. And according to the WalletHub website, folks in this fair state are among the most politically engaged in the country. Continue to count down the site’s political-engagement top ten,…
This has been a tricky election year, with bogeymen from outside Colorado pouring tens of millions of dollars into a grab bag of candy-coated campaign gimmicks. A week from now, it will all be over but for the shouting…and the indigestion. In the meantime, here are the top six tricks…
When Rachel Maddow teased her appearance in Denver this week, she cited a governor’s race that was “off the hook,” yet she made little mention of the contest in the actual Tuesday night broadcast from the Viewhouse Ballpark. Last night, however, we found out what this allusion meant via a…
If you ask those in favor of Amendment 67 and those opposed to it what it would do, you’ll get very different answers. Opponents say it would ban abortion. Supporters say that’s not the point. The point, they say, is to make it so unborn babies are treated the same…
